No proof whether dead or alive: VK

Smita Sharma

Tribune News Service

New Delhi, October 28

A fresh bid to trace 39 missing Indians in Iraq has yielded no result so far. Minister of State for External Affairs Gen VK Singh (retd), who reached Iraq on October 24, told a TV correspondent in Baghdad that there was “no conclusive evidence of them being dead or alive”.

VK Singh had discussions with senior Iraqi officials in Baghdad, including Faleh Fayyadh, National Security Adviser, and Othman al-Ghanmi, Chief of Staff of the army.

He held meetings with other government and international agency representatives, but with “no positive outcome”. The minister spent two days in Mosul, Badush and Talfa. He described Mosul as a “ghost town”.

He has handed over DNA samples taken from a few relatives of the missing men from Punjab to the Iraqi authorities. More samples are being collected.

The samples will be matched with Iraqi as well as International Committee of Red Cross (ICRC) databases. The samples will help Iraqi investigators in their search “to verify the identity of the thousands of victims left by ISIS, whether alive or exhumed bodies, as a number of mass graves have been discovered in the areas that were under ISIS control”.

VK Singh had earlier visited Iraq in July after Mosul was freed from the clutches of the Islamic State. The Indian government had then claimed that the last known location of these Indians was a prison on the outskirts of Badush. However, media reports showed the prison in ruins and the area desolate.