“We’re aware of recent reports that a video featuring USA hostage Caitlan Coleman and her husband Joshua Boyle has been released”, State Department spokesperson John Kirby said during a regular press conference Tuesday.
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An American-Canadian couple held hostage by the Taliban for four years have urged their governments to pressure Kabul to change its policy on executions of captured insurgents, according to a new video which surfaced on Tuesday.
USA and Canadian officials have said they are aware of the video of Caitlan Coleman, a U.S. citizen and her Canadian husband, Joshua Boyle, who were kidnapped in 2012 while on a backpacking trip.
Coleman gave birth to their children while in captivity. The families said they were disappointed that their children and grandchild were not freed as part of the same deal but were still holding out hope for the USA and Canadian governments to secure their release on humanitarian grounds.
Joshua, 33, from Toronto, Canada, appears exhausted and pale in the footage – the first featuring either of them since 2014.
A website called Site Intelligence Group (SITE), which monitors extremist activity online, posted the video Tuesday.
“The Government of Canada will not comment or release any information which may compromise or risk endangering the safety of Canadian citizens overseas”, read an email from the Global Affairs Spokesman Michael O’Shaughnessy. He said the government will not comment further or release any information that might risk endangering the safety of Canadian citizens overseas.
Boyle said their Taliban captors are “are terrified of the thought of their own mortality approaching, and are saying that they will take reprisals on our family”.
“Because of their fear they are willing to kill us, willing to kill women, to kill children, to kill whomever, in order to get these policies reversed or take revenge”.
“I know this must be very terrifying and horrifying for my family to hear that these men are willing to go to these lengths, but they are”, Coleman, wearing a black headscarf, said in the video.
A phone message left at a number listed for Coleman’s family in Stewartstown, Pennsylvania, was not immediately returned. He added that Washington had spoken to the governments of both Afghanistan and Pakistan to insist on the need to ensure that captured US citizens are returned home safely.
In 2013, they had appeared in a video in which the couple begged the United States government to have them released from captivity.
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Last month, Jim and Lyn Coleman revealed that they had received a letter from their daughter in November through a neutral party.
