The 39 Indian nationals abducted by Islamic State (IS) in Iraq were shot in the head, said a report.
The 39 Indian nationals abducted by Islamic State (IS) in Iraq were shot in the head, said a report.
The victims, most of whom hailed from Punjab, were working on projects near strife-ridden Mosul when they were kidnapped during their evacuation. Their bodies were buried near the village of Badush, northwest of Mosul, in an area that Iraqi forces recaptured last July.
Dr Zaid Ali Abbas, head of Forensic Medicine department told Hindustan Times from Baghdad that “most of the bodies had gunshot wounds on the head”.
“When the remains came to us, they were just skeletons, only bones. They had no muscle or tissue. Forensically, I can confirm that they definitely died over a year ago,’’ Abbas said.
Iraqi official Najiha Abdul-Amir al-Shimari said that the killing was a "heinous crime carried out by Daesh terrorist gangs.
The bodies are "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 Islamic State group.
Around 10,000 Indians worked and lived in Iraq at that time. Search operations led to a mound near Badush where local residents said bodies had been buried by the IS, External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj said in Parliament.
Iraqi authorities used radar to establish 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.
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.
In a release posted on the website, MEA said,"We are grateful to the Forensics Department of Ministry of Health of Iraq for their hard work in completing the process of matching the DNAs retrieved from the human remains with the blood samples of the relatives of the deceased Indians brought from India.”
Meanwhile, 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.
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