39 Indians kidnapped in Iraq are dead, says Foreign Minister Sushma Swaraj

39 Indians held hostages in by the ISIS in Mosul are dead Sushma Swaraj, the Foreign Minister confirmed this in the parliament today. She further said, “We wanted to give the families closure only after getting solid proof”.

It was yesterday that the government was informed that the DNA samples of the 38 Indians had matched the remains of the bodies that were found lying below a mass grave. As a matter of fact, a body came out to be a 70 percent match.

One minute’s silence was observed in the parliament after Sushma Swaraj’s statement. She told the Rajya Sabha, “We used a deep dissemination satellite to see a mass grave… We requested that the bodies be brought out, unearthed”.

Just about a year ago Ms Swaraj had stated it to the workers’ families that an Iraqi official, citing intelligence sources had intimated VK Singh that the Indians were working at a construction site of a hospital but were transferred to a farm prior to being jailed in Badush.

Moreover, the opposition seeing this as a perfect chance to encash on planted attacks including the Congress party stated that they misled the nation by stating that the hostages were imprisoned in Badush. Partap Singh Bajwa, one of the lawmakers of the main opposition party referring to the reports from the media said, “She has lost all credibility”.

Harjit Masih from the city of Gurdaspur and who was one of the Indians who was kidnapped has somehow managed to make an escape and made claims to have seen the massacre of the others. However, the government had dismissed it.

It is to be noted that more than 10,000 Indians had fled the country of Iraq during the surge in violence in the year 2014, that included dozens of nurses who were kidnapped for short duration by suspected terrorists of ISIS in Mosul and Tikrit before being permitted to return home.