39 Indians held hostage by IS in Iraq declared dead

Smita Sharma

Tribune News Service

New Delhi, March 20

The trauma that began in June of 2014 as families of 39 Indians received panic calls just days after their abduction by Islamic State in Iraq, will hopefully now find a closure.

External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj on Tuesday informed Rajya Sabha that the 39 missing Indians, who were abducted in the northern city of Mosul, were killed. 

After the fall of Mosul to Iraqi forces in July last year mass graves were seen. Minister of State for External Affairs V K Singh, who flew to Baghdad within 24 hours of the recapture, was tasked with collecting DNA samples from relatives of missing persons for matching first with countless bodies exhumed from mass graves and later from a specific mound. 

The first body whose sample matched was a boy named Sandeep Kumar.There were 39 bodies. 

From the archives: Families of 39 missing Indians in Iraq asked to give DNA samples

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"Yesterday, they informed us that DNA of 38 persons have matched," Swaraj said in Parliament. 

She added families of the dead were not informed prior to the announcement as Parliament is in session and the House had to be informed first. 

Najiha Abdul-Amir al-Shimari, Head of Iraq's Martyrs Establishment that coordinated closely with the Indian government on search and forensic examination process, informed on Tuesday that the bodies were found buried near Badush, northwest of Mosul.

Of the 39 dead, 27 are from Punjab, four from Himachal Pradesh, six from Bihar and two from West Bengal. 

Raju Yadav from Bihar is the only Indian whose DNA matching is awaited as he did not have parents and samples of his close relatives were sent across which have so far matched 70 per cent. The mortal remains will be flown back to the respective states with General VK Singh flying to Baghdad in a special aircraft as soon as Indian Ambassador Pradeep Singh Rajpurohit completes the documentation process.

Meanwhile, Swaraj defended her ministry saying she had not misled or provided false hope to the families whom she had met at least a dozen times since the abduction crisis. Questions remained as to why did the government not take seriously the account of lone survivor Harjit Masih who called himself Ali and fled the ISIS camp with Bangladeshi workers in 2014. 

Back home, he claimed that remaining Indians had been shot dead. Masih complained of harassment for having stated facts, a claim dismissed by Sushma Swaraj as baseless. "Harjit Masih is an individual, we are a government. If the government simply announced deaths based on Masih's account, it would have been irresponsible," stated Swaraj, adding that Masih had been kept in protective custody. "We are not a missing, believed to be dead government," she retorted.

The following is the list Indian nationals killed in Iraq around Mosul. The list was put out by the MEA.