Government believes 39 Indians held hostage by ISIS still alive

NEW DELHI: The Centre has denied a news report that 39 Indians abducted in Iraq were executed by the Islamic State while adding that New Delhi has not given up hope on the missing persons, with leads from six different sources including Red Crescent. External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj told the Rajya Sabha that one of the 39 captives, Harjeet Bassi, who managed to escape, had claimed that all others were taken to a forest and shot dead. Bassi said he and others were taken to a forest and shot and he was the only one left. “There are contradictions in the story Bassi said... It is logical not to accept the statement. We have got six sources which said they have not been killed,” she said.

The 39 construction workers, mostly from families in Punjab and Haryana, were employed with a Turkish construction company in Mosul when they were abducted in June. A news channel on Thursday night quoted two Bangladeshi workers to claim IS had executed all 39.

“This is not the first news report that claimed that 39 Indians have been killed by ISIS. This was reported by an English newspaper before and has come up repeatedly in my meetings with relatives of those held hostage. We had two options. We could have believed Harjeet and assumed all 39 were dead or continued our search… In hindsight our call to continue the search was right because we have inputs from six different sources that the hostages are alive. Even if Harjeet is 99% correct, we’ll continue our search based on 1% hope. We have got written messages that say they are alive,” she said.

Swaraj said she had shown the messages to her colleagues but the contents of the letter could not be made public.