He repeatedly told reporters that everyone in the group had been killed. “It is baseless that Harjit Masih was harassed, he was kept in protective custody”.
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National Conference leader Omar Abdullah said it was “unpardonable” that families of victims had to learn about their heartbreaking loss from television channels instead of the government. “The government just wanted to make us live in false hope till its time in power was about to get over”, he said.
We have been seeking time from the minister for the last several months but we were not given a chance to meet her, he claimed.
The minister, she added, had been saying all along that that he was alive and they are tracing the location. “Playing politics on deaths”, said Swaraj.
Manjinder Singh, who was into farming, was pushed into Iraq by fraudulent travel agents, she claimed.
In village Kamalpura in Amritsar, Jasbir Kaur, older sister of Ranjit Singh, is not able to come to terms with the news.
Ms Swaraj added that it was highly likely that the body of the 39th worker had also been found but she said that it was a 70% match.
Families of the hostages reacted with shock and grief to the news. Echoing the same sentiments, Punjab Chief Minister Captain Amarinder Singh said, “We had expected this, it should have been announced earlier, and it was known since much earlier”. On the day of the slaughter, he said, the men were taken outside and forced to kneel.
That hope unexpectedly shattered today. “Since 2014 I had been pleading with the govt to bring him back somehow and today they say that he is no more”, Puroshottam Tiwari, Uncle of Vidya Bhushan Tiwari, a resident of Bihar, who was among 39 Indians killed in Iraq’s Mosul.
India said on Tuesday that 39 Indians, who were kidnapped by Islamic State militants in Iraq in 2014, had been confirmed dead after their bodies were found and DNA samples matched.
“Out of the deceased, 27 people were from Punjab, six from Bihar, four from Himachal Pradesh and two from West Bengal”.
The Minister said the bodies were exhumed from a mound.
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The Indian government has said that Iraqi authorities have assured it of all cooperation in locating the captives. He also said the workers had been in phone contact with their families and the Indian embassy in Baghdad in the days before their execution.
