Retrieving the dead

Smita Sharma 

Tribune News Service

New Delhi, March 20

It required resorting to both technology and religious symbols to conclusively prove that the 39 missing Indians were dead. “We recovered ID cards, long hair, kadas (bracelets) which our Sikh brothers wear and non-Iraqi footwear. So we thought these men could be ours,” Sushma Swaraj said.

 Minister of State for External Affairs VK Singh was sent to Baghdad thrice to coordinate with the Iraqi authorities on the search mission after the families had not heard from the men for nearly a month after the recapture of Mosul by Iraqi forces on July 9, 2017.

The government began scanning mass graves with MoS Singh requesting the Iraqi authorities to use deep radar penetration at a particular mound near the Badush prison, where the government believed that the Indians might have been in captivity. 

After signs of evidence from the Badush mound, the corpses were found, the bodies exhumed and flown to Baghdad for DNA tests to match with the samples from families and relatives collected last September onwards from Punjab, Himachal, Bengal and Bihar. The exercise was undertaken through humanitarian assistance group Martyrs Foundation. 

“We cannot figure out when they were killed. That is now irrelevant since whenever they were killed, the bodies could not have been retrieved,” remarked Swaraj in response to questions on discounting Harjit Masih’s claim made in 2014. She added there was information from two heads of states of the men being alive.