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India says 39 of its citizens who were kidnapped by Islamic State in Iraq in 2014 have been confirmed dead after remains recovered from a mass grave outside Mosul were DNA tested.

The Indian external affairs minister, Sushma Swaraj, told parliament that tests had shown a match with the construction workers, who disappeared in June 2014 when the city fell to Isis.

“With full proof I can say these 39 are dead,” Swaraj said on Tuesday.

India had maintained that at least some of the hostages could still be alive – contrary to the testimony of one survivor – and had said it would not announce their deaths without concrete evidence.

Swaraj said ID cards, long hair and the kara bracelets traditionally worn by Sikh men were recovered from the grave of the workers, who mostly hailed from Punjab state.

The bodies were found near Badush, a village about six miles from the construction site where the men were snatched. Isis has been accused of killing at least 500 inmates from a prison in the same area in June 2014.

One of the workers, Harjit Masih, managed to escape the massacre, returning to India in 2015 and telling a news website that he and his colleagues were taken to Badush four days after their kidnapping and gunned down.

He claimed to have only been grazed by a bullet and to have escaped to the Kurdish-controlled city of Erbil. He also said the workers had been in phone contact with their families and the Indian embassy in Baghdad in the days before their execution.

But Swaraj has consistently disputed his account of the hostages’ deaths and said on Tuesday that Masih had escaped from Iraq by posing as a Muslim from Bangladesh.

In a press conference later on Tuesday, she defended the delay in confirming the men’s deaths despite mounting evidence they had been executed. “It would have been a sin had we handed over anybody’s body claiming it to be those of our people, just for the sake of closing files,” she said.

The Punjab chief minister, Amarinder Singh, tweeted: “Shattered at the heart-wrenching news ... that the 39 Indians missing in Iraq, most of whom were Punjabis, are dead.

“My heart goes out to the families who had been living in hope since their reported abduction by Isis in 2014. Prayers with all of them.”



Shashi Tharoor, a member of the opposition Congress party, accused the government of “giving false hope to the nation” by refusing to confirm the mens’ deaths before this week. “That was disappointing behaviour,” he said.

</s>Bodies of 39 Kidnapped Indian Workers Found In Mass Grave In Iraq

For years Harjit Masih has been talking about what happened outside of the Iraqi city of Mosul, the Associated Press reported. He and 39 other Indian men — all construction workers working on the Mosul University campus — had been kidnapped by members of ISIS as the extremist group waged its assault on the city.

The Sikh men were held captive for a handful of days then, Masih told Fountain Ink, they were forced to kneel shoulder to shoulder and shot multiple times at close range. Masih, who was shot in the thigh, was the lone survivor and managed to escape. Eventually, he made his way back to India, where until now the government's highest officials insisted there was no proof all the other prisoners were dead.

"They were killed in front of my eyes," he said from his home in a northern Indian village on Tuesday, the same day India's foreign minister, Sushma Swaraj, told parliament that DNA analysis of remains found in a mass grave near the village of Badush prove that the men who were abducted in 2014 were killed, The Guardian said.

"With full proof I can say these 39 are dead," Swaraj told reporters, adding that the missing workers had been murdered by ISIS, according to The Telegraph.

The AP said the bodies were found under a dirt mound after Iraqi authorities found evidence of the grave last summer using radar equipment. Once the bodies were exhumed, Indian authorities sent DNA samples from relatives of the missing workers. All but one have been identified.

Among the artifacts discovered at the site were ID cards, non-Iraqi shoes and religious bracelets.

In the days leading up to their disappearance, the AP reported many of the men made panicked phone calls to their relatives back in India, pleading for help to escape the ISIS-controlled region.

As a result, as NPR reported, anxious families began swamping government hotlines. "A majority of the Indians kidnapped in Iraq hail from Punjab," Punjab's deputy chief minister Sukhbir Singh Badal told NPR. "We are really worried ... The federal government must take every necessary action to bring [them] back home," he said at the time.

But The Telegraph reported, the Indian government never received any ransom demands or other direct communication from the kidnappers.

Swaraj, has been roundly criticized by members of the opposing party "for giving false hope to the nation." But she defended the decision to wait until this week to declare the men dead, insisting the government needed proof.

"It would have been a sin had we handed over anybody's body claiming it to be those of our people, just for the sake of closing files," she said.

The AP says dozens of mass graves like the one found outside of Badush have been discovered in territories previously held by ISIS. However, the Iraqi government says it doesn't possess the resources or trained personnel to examine all of them.

The Indian government said the identified bodies will be flown home after formalities are completed in Iraq.</s>Iraqi authorities have discovered a mass grave with the bodies of 38 Indian construction workers abducted when Daesh militants overran the northern city of Mosul in 2014, officials said Tuesday.

The bodies were found buried near the village of Badush, northwest of Mosul, in an area that Iraqi forces recaptured last July.

The killing was a "heinous crime carried out by Daesh terrorist gangs," Iraqi official Najiha Abdul-Amir al-Shimari told reporters.

The people killed were "citizens of the friendly Indian state. Their dignity was supposed to be protected, but the forces of evil wanted to defame the principles of Islam," said Najiha, the head of Iraq's Martyrs Establishment, a government body dealing with people killed in the fight against the Daesh terror group.

The abducted workers, most from northern India, had been employed by a construction company operating near Mosul when militants captured wide swaths of northern Iraq in the summer of 2014.

Relatives said they received panicked phone calls from some of the workers five days after Mosul was captured, asking for help.

Around 10,000 Indians worked and lived in Iraq at that time.

Dozens of mass graves have been discovered in territory once held by the Daesh terror group, though Iraq's government has only been able to examine a handful of them. Iraqi officials say they lack the resources and trained personnel to properly exhume so many sites.

At the height of their power, Daesh controlled nearly a third of the country.

After Iraq recaptured the area around Mosul, search operations led to a mound of dirt near Badush, where local residents said bodies had been buried by Daesh, Indian foreign minister Sushma Swaraj said in Parliament.

Iraqi authorities used radar to verify that the mound was a mass grave, she said, and then exhumed the bodies. Indian authorities then sent DNA samples from relatives of the missing workers.

Forty Indians were captured by the militants, though one man managed to escape. Iraqi authorities said the mass grave held 39 bodies, but only 38 have been positively identified through DNA analysis. Analysis on the last body has not yet been completed, Swaraj said.

"It is indeed a moment of deep grief and sadness for us," India's ambassador to Iraq, Pradeep Singh Rajpurohit, told reporters in Baghdad. "India strongly condemns terrorism in all forms and manifestations and stands in solidarity with the government and the people of Iraq in their fight against terrorism."

He said the bodies will be sent back to India "in a couple of weeks or so."

Harjit Masih, the only Indian survivor, has long said that the rest of the group had been killed. He said they had all been held for a number of days, then taken outside and ordered to kneel. Then the militants opened fire.

"They were killed in front of my eyes," he told reporters Tuesday in his north Indian home village. He was shot in the thigh but managed to escape.

Iraq, which is in the midst of an economic crisis, is also struggling to remove rebuild after more than three years of grueling war against the militants. The fight against Daesh has cost Iraq more than $1 billion in destroyed infrastructure, officials say.

In February, Turkey pledged $5 billion in loans and investment to its southern neighbor, making the country one of the top contributors to reconstruction efforts.</s>External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj on Tuesday confirmed in Parliament that the 39 Indians who were kidnapped in Iraq’s Mosul in June 2014, have died. The confirmation came after all the 39 bodies matched the DNA of the missing persons. Speaking in the Rajya Sabha, the Foreign Minister said Islamic State (IS) is responsible for the killing and that the maximum of the dead hailed from the state of Punjab. The mortal remains of the deceased will be brought back to India soon.

In the meantime the kin of the deceased expressing their anguish said that the government should have informed them first before making the announcement in Parliament. Sushma Swaraj said that a deep penetration radar confirmed that all the 39 Indians were dead after all bodies were exhumed from the ground. She further said that the DNA samples of 38 people have matched while around 70% DNA accuracy has been achieved for the 39th person. The mortal remains have been sent to Baghdad for the verification of the bodies.

General VK Singh will travel to Iraq to bring back the mortal remains of the Indians killed in Iraq. As planned, the plane carrying mortal remains will first go to Amritsar, then to Patna and then to Kolkata. Earlier in October 2017, DNA samples of relatives were taken to verify the missing people. During the entire process, the governments of four states – Himachal Pradesh, West Bengal, Bihar and Punjab.

Just after the information was delivered by the BJP leader, the opposition attacked the ruling government asking why the information on the dead people was delayed. While speaking to media, Congress leader Shashi Tharoor said, “This is saddening for every Indian, rest I would ask why was this information delayed by the government, they should tell how it happened, when they died. Also, the way government gave high hopes to the families was not right.”

“The country has never seen such a sorry state, this is not proper. You are insensitive for your own people. House is not in order & so no-confidence motion cannot be moved.” said Lok Sabha Speaker Sumitra Mahajan while adjourning the house due to sloganeering by the opposition.</s>Sometime in June 2014, Indian construction worker Harjit Masih lay motionless, playing dead among 39 still warm bodies. Lying beside him were his massacred compatriots. They had all been shot by militants of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) in Mosul, Iraq. Receiving a bullet to his leg, Masih lived to tell the tale.

“I pray and hope that somebody survived, like I did. The chances are bleak. It would be a miracle because they all lay in a pool of blood with nobody responding to my calls,” Masih, then 25, had told the Indian Express newspaper in 2015.

However, for some reason, his version has been rejected by the country’s foreign ministry for nearly four years.

Their remains had been found in a mass grave on the hills outside Badush, a village in northern Iraq. On March 20, though, external affairs minister Sushma Swaraj informed the Indian parliament—and the country—that the 39 abducted Indians are now confirmed dead. “Yesterday, we got information that DNA samples of 38 people have matched and DNA of the 39th person has matched 70%,” Swaraj said. Their remains had been found in a mass grave on the hills outside Badush, a village in northern Iraq.

Swaraj’s statement, coming after years of assurance that they were all most likely alive and well, brings to an abrupt end a traumatic episode for the hapless relatives of the victims.

The construction workers, employees of a Baghdad-based firm, were reportedly abducted in mid-June 2014, after ISIL militants took control of Mosul, Iraq’s second-biggest city. The workers hailed from villages in Punjab, Bihar, West Bengal, and Himachal Pradesh.

Years later, distraught relatives would recount their last phone conversations, mostly on or around June 14, 2014. “Wait for me, I will come back,” Anita Rani recalled her then 39-year-old husband Gurdeep Singh saying.

In the same month, 46 Indian nurses, too, were taken hostage by ISIL from the Iraqi city of Tikrit. They were eventually released after 23 harrowing days and their experience went on to inspire movies in India.

But the group from Mosul went silent.

In the nearly four years since, conflicting stories have floated around about what exactly happened to the construction workers. The Indian government maintained that they were alive and safe, assuring that search operations were underway.

In November 2014, two Bangladeshi men, who reportedly were among the 53 other workers abducted with the Indians, told the TV channel APB Live that the militants armed with guns had first sought to know what faith they followed. They then separated the Indians and Bangladeshis.

Masih told FountainInk in 2015 that the Indians had been made to line up on a hill-top, where the militants shot them from behind. He claimed to have been hit in the right leg, but stayed on the ground till the militants left him for dead. Covered in blood, he eventually managed to get to an Iraqi army checkpoint in Erbil, where he was picked up by the Indian embassy.

Months after his escape and arrival back home, he opened up to the Indian media about the consequences.

Masih’s misery was far from ending. Firstly, his account was rejected by the victims’ relatives as well as foreign minister Swaraj. Eight of her sources, she said, had confirmed that the 39 were alive.

He then alleged that, on his return, Indian officials had held him in custody for months. “I was told there was a threat to my life from the parents of the 39 hostages. I somehow did not understand this,” said Masih. In 2016, he was arrested on charges of human trafficking, based on a complaint by one of the victims’ relatives.

Meanwhile, the wait for the distraught families continued, despite not having heard a word from the missing persons.

Last year, after Mosul was finally liberated from ISIL control, Swaraj said they were likely to be held in a jail in Badush. Minister of state for external affairs VK Singh was sent to look for them. However, an India Today reporter found that the said jail had been destroyed by ISIL years ago, and there were no signs of the Indians.

The Iraqi authorities then reportedly began digging in the hills outside Badush, where ISIL was known to bury its victims. The officials uncovered a mass grave with 39 bodies, later identified as the missing Indian workers.

A call from Swaraj now could have given them some closure. “They found the bodies of men with long black hair and silver bracelets known as karas that are worn by followers of the Sikh religion,” an AP report said on March 20. They had been shot in the head, and it was apparent that the bodies had been buried for a long time, reports said.

Masih now feels “vindicated” by the government’s confirmation of the deaths of his fellow workers, the Indian Express reported. He is out on bail and works as a daily-wage labourer in Punjab’s Gurdaspur district.

For the families of the others, struggling to rebuild their lives after clutching at straws for years, Swaraj’s conclusion is hard to stomach. Many were shocked at the “insensitive” manner in which the government confirmed the deaths, announcing them in parliament instead of notifying the families personally.

Their wait began after that last distraught call from the men in June 2014. A call from Swaraj now could have given them some closure.</s>All the 39 Indians abducted by Islamic State in Iraq’s Mosul in 2014 were dead, external affairs minister Sushma Swaraj told the Rajya Sabha on Monday, dashing hopes of families that were desperately hoping for their safe return.

The bodies were exhumed from a mass grave and sent to Baghdad for DNA tests, the minister said. “Yesterday we got information that DNA samples of 38 people have matched and DNA of the 39th person has matched 70 per cent,” Swaraj said.

Minister of state for external affairs VK Singh would bring back the mortal remains from Iraq. The plane would first go to Amritsar, then to Patna and then to Kolkata, the minister said.

Harjit Masih, the only Indian to escape the abductors, had claimed that the others in the group were gunned down on June 15, 2014.

The group of 40 men, most of them construction workers, were snatched from war-ravaged Mosul, the northern Iraqi city which was once a stronghold of Islamic State.

Late last year, the Indian government collected DNA samples from the families after several mass graves were found in Mosul that was liberated from IS clutches in July of that year.

The government had classified the men as missing and had said it would continue its search for them till it received concrete proof of their death.</s>On Tuesday, former union minister and senior Congress leader Salman Khurshid blamed the external affairs ministry cause they took a long time to confirm the killing of 39 Indians by Islamic State (IS).

“It is tragic. To an extent what external affairs minister is saying is understandable, what is difficult to understand is inability all these days to have ascertained the truth and to have in sense misled people of India about how terrible the truth was,” the former external affairs minister said.

Khurshid also stated that not to make it a political compete and also everyone should pray for the lost lives.

On March 20, External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj, in the Rajya Sabha, said all the 39 Indians, who went missing in Mosul in 2014, had been dead by the Islamic state’s intervention.

Swaraj said Minister of State (MoS) External Affairs General V.K. Singh will go to Mosul in Iraq to get back the living remains.

 The victims, most of them from Punjab, were working on projects near Mosul when they were kidnapped during their evacuation.</s>NEW DELHI: External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj today informed Rajya Sabha that thirty-nine Indians who were kidnapped by the Islamic State in Iraq's Mosul in 2014 are dead. Speaking at the Rajya Sabha she mentioned that their bodies were spotted using deep penetration radar. The bodies were exhumed from mass graves and their identities confirmed by DNA tests. "The bodies were sent to Baghdad for DNA testing. The DNA of 38 Indians have been matched," she said. All of them…

NEW DELHI: External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj today informed Rajya Sabha that thirty-nine Indians who were kidnapped by the Islamic State in Iraq’s Mosul in 2014 are dead.

Speaking at the Rajya Sabha she mentioned that their bodies were spotted using deep penetration radar. The bodies were exhumed from mass graves and their identities confirmed by DNA tests.

 “The bodies were sent to Baghdad for DNA testing. The DNA of 38 Indians have been matched,” she said.

All of them were construction workers, mostly from Punjab, and were employed by an Iraqi company in Mosul. They were taken hostage by Islamic State militants when they took control of the second largest city in Iraq in 2014. The workers were trying to leave Mosul when they were held hostage.

Minister of State for External Affairs V.K. Singh visited Iraq, days after Mosul was liberated by Iraqi forces from the rule of Islamic State.

Congress leader Shashi Tharoor remarked: This is saddening for every Indian, rest I would ask why was this information delayed by the govt, they should tell how it happened, when they died. Also, the way government gave high hopes to the families was not right.”</s>The 39 missing Indians, who were taken hostage by ISIL in the Iraqi city of Mosul, have been killed, India’s Foreign Minister Sushma Swaraj said on Tuesday.

The minister told Rajya Sabha, the upper house of parliament, that the government got confirmation on Monday that the DNA of 38 missing Indians had matched with remains found in a mass grave.

The DNA of a 39th body matched only for 70 percent, the minister said.

The grave was found after Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS) fighters were driven out of the Iraqi city.

“I have concrete proof that 39 Indians have been killed,” Swaraj said about the Indians who were abducted by ISIL in 2014. “We wanted to give the families closure,” she said.

The physical remains of the Indians will be brought by the government in a special aircraft, the minister told parliament.

One of the workers was able to escape the ISIL custody, the minister said.

India’s foreign ministry spokesperson had confirmed in June 2014 that 40 Indian workers of the Tariq Nur Al Huda company in Mosul were kidnapped when ISIL captured Mosul and large parts of Iraq.

Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi declared “total victory” over ISIL in July last year after nearly three years of war backed by the US-led coalition.</s>The US today offered its “deepest condolences” on the death of 39 Indian nationals abducted by ISIS in Iraq, saying it stands with the people of India in condemning the murders. External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj yesterday told Parliament in New Delhi that the 39 Indians abducted in 2014 by the Islamic State (ISIS) terrorists in Mosul city were dead and their bodies had been recovered.

“We offer our deepest condolences. Our thoughts are with the families of the victims,” a State Department spokesperson told PTI responding to a question on the discovery of a mass grave with the bodies of the Indian construction workers. “We stand with the people of India in condemning these murders,” the spokesperson said.

The northern Iraqi city of Mosul has now been liberated from the ISIS. The bodies of Indian workers were found buried near the village of Badsuh, which is in the northwest of Mosul.
Indian external affairs minister Sushma Swaraj tells Parliament DNA testing on remains in a mass grave in Iraq confirms 39 Indian nationals believed to have been kidnapped by ISIL have been killed.