Janjivan Bureau / New Delhi : External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj today accepted that all the 39 Indians, who were abducted by ISIS in Iraq nearly three years back, were killed and their bodies have been recovered. After the statement of Sushma, Harjit Masih alleged that Sushma is speaking lie since last three years. He alleged that all the abducted indian were killed in 2014.
Masih was one of the 40 Indian workers abducted by Islamic State militant outfit. His statement came after External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj informed the Parliament on Tuesday that all the 39 Indian workers, abducted by Islamic State in Iraq nearly three years ago, were killed and their bodies have been recovered.
As many as 40 Indians were originally abducted by terrorist organisation ISIS in June 2015 from Mosul in Iraq but one of them escaped by posing as a Muslim from Bangladesh, Swaraj said in a suo motu statement in Rajya Sabha. The remaining 39 Indians were taken to Badoosh and killed.
Search operations led to a mound in Badoosh where locals said some bodies were buried by the ISIS. Deep penetration radars were used to establish that the mound indeed was a mass grave, she said, adding the Indian authorities requested their Iraqi counterpart to exhume the bodies.
Swaraj said the mass grave had exactly 39 bodies, with distinctive features like long hair, non-Iraqi shoes and IDs. The bodies were then sent to Baghdad for DNA testing.
As sonn as Sushma statement flash on TV screen Harjit Masih, the lone survivor who had managed to flee from Islamic State captivity in Iraq in June 2014 following his abduction along with 39 other Indians there, on Tuesday said he had been maintaining for the last three years that all others had been killed.
“I had been saying for the last three years that all 39 Indians had been killed (by Islamic State militants),” Masih said on Tuesday.
“I had spoken the truth,” asserted Masih, resident of village Kala Afghana in Gurdaspur district of Punjab.
Masih said they were killed in front of his eyes and that he had been saying all these years, wondering why the government was not accepting what he had said earlier.
Giving details of the incident, Masih said that Indians were working at a factory in Iraq in 2014.
“But we were kidnapped by militants and kept hostage for some days,” he said.
On the fateful day, they were made to sit on their knees and the militants then opened fire upon them.
“I was fortunate to have survived though a bullet hit my thigh and I fell unconscious,” he said. He, however, managed to return to India after giving a slip to the Islamic State militants suffering gun wound.
As many as 39 Indians, who had gone to Iraq to earn their livelihood, had been missing since 2014. Among them, several were from Amritsar, Gurdaspur, Hoshiarpur, Kapurthala and Jalandhar in Punjab.
DNA testing by Martyrs Foundation has established identity of 38 Indians while there has been 70 per cent matching of the DNA for the 39th person, she said.
Minister of State for External Affairs V K Singh will be flying to Iraq to bring back the bodies on a special flight.
