TORONTO: Joshua Boyle — the Canadian citizen who was recently rescued along with his wife and three children — has revealed that their captors killed a newborn daughter and raped his wife during the five years they were held in captivity.

Mr Boyle returned to his parents’ home in Canada on Saturday, along with his American wife, Caitlan Coleman, and three young children.

“The stupidity and evil of the Haqqani Network’s kidnapping of a pilgrim and his heavily pregnant wife engaged in helping ordinary villagers in Taliban-controlled regions of Afghanistan was eclipsed only by the stupidity and evil of authorising the murder of my infant daughter,” he said in a statement.

Pakistan Army spokesperson rejects as propaganda reports that release was negotiated

The couple said they were in Afghanistan to help villagers “who live deep inside Taliban-controlled Afghanistan where no NGO, no aid worker and no government has ever successfully been able to bring the necessary help”.

Ms Coleman was pregnant at the time and had four children in captivity, but the birth of the fourth child had not been publicly known before Mr Boyle appeared before journalists at the Toronto airport.

Mr Boyle claimed she was raped by a guard who was assisted by his superiors, and asked the Afghan government to bring them to justice. “God willing, this litany of stupidity will be the epitaph of the Haqqani network,” he said.

Earlier, on the plane from London, Mr Boyle provided a separate, handwritten statement expressing disagreement with the US foreign policy.

He nodded toward one of the State Department officials and said, “Their interests are not my interests.”

“It will be of incredible importance to my family that we are able to build a secure sanctuary for our three surviving children to call a home,” Mr Boyle said.

Foreign Office spokesperson Nafees Zakaria said the Pakistani raid that led to the rescue was based on a tip from US intelligence and shows that Pakistan will act against a “common enemy” when Washington shares information.

According to the Associated Press, a US military official said that a military hostage team had flown to Pakistan to fly the family out. The team did a preliminary health assessment and had a transport plane ready to go, but sometime after daybreak on Thursday, as the family members were walking to the plane, Boyle said he did not want to board.

Boyle’s father said his son did not want to board the plane because it was headed to Bagram Airbase and the family wanted to return directly to North America. Another US official said Boyle was nervous about being in “custody” given his family ties.

He was once married to Zaynab Khadr, the older sister of former Guantanamo Bay detainee Omar Khadr and the daughter of a senior Al Qaeda-linked figure.

Iftikhar A. Khan adds: In a video played by Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR) chief Maj Gen Asif Ghafoor during a press conference in Rawalpindi on Saturday, Mr Boyle is heard praising the efforts of the Pakistan Army in securing their release.

“The ISI and the army got between the criminals and the car to make sure that my family was safe,” Mr Boyle said, adding: “The criminals who held us were not good Muslims or bad Muslims, they were pagan. They did not even make a pretence of being Muslim and ceased to call themselves Mujahideen.”

He also praised the different agencies that were involved with their rescue, hoping that Western media reports will look at Pakistan differently in the wake of this development.

During the briefing, Maj Gen Ghafoor rejected “propaganda” that no rescue operation had been mounted to secure the abducted Canadian national and his family, and that their release was negotiated by Pakistan’s intelligence services.

The ISPR chief explained how the terrorists’ vehicles had been detected, and they were isolated from the hostages. He said all the work was carried out in less than three hours of the receipt of intelligence from the US embassy.

The ISPR chief said the US had shown trust and confidence in the Pakistan Army, adding that there was no room for ‘do more’.

Published in Dawn, October 15th, 2017