Ottawa: Canadian Joshua Boyle, who along with his American wife and three children was held hostage by the Taliban for five years and freed just days back, has spoken about the terror outfit’s “stupidity and evil”, revealing they murdered his daughter and raped his wife.
Boyle, 34, spoke to reporters after landing in Canada with his wife Caitlan Coleman, 31, and children following a rescue operation by the Pakistani Army after a US tip-off during an operation near the Afghan border, the BBC said.
The Boyles were captured while reportedly backpacking in Afghanistan in 2012.
Boyle told reporters at the Toronto’s Pearson International Airport that the couple had been trying to deliver aid to villagers in a part of the Taliban-controlled region “where no NGO, no aid worker, and no government” had been able to reach when they were kidnapped.
Coleman was heavily pregnant at the time with their first child.
This week, they returned with three children, all born in captivity, the youngest of whom is understood to be in poor health.
In his statement, Boyle appeared to suggest they had had a fourth child, a baby girl who had been killed by their captors, the Taliban-aligned Haqqani network, as he also revealed they had raped his wife, the BBC said.
It was, he said, “retaliation for my repeated refusal” to accept an offer made to him by the network.
“The stupidity and the evil of the Haqqani network in the kidnapping of a pilgrim… was eclipsed only by the stupidity and evil of authorising the murder of my infant daughter,” he said.
“And the stupidity and evil of the subsequent rape of my wife, not as a lone action, but by one guard, but assisted by the captain of the guard and supervised by the commandant,” the BBC quoted Boyle as saying.
Coleman’s father has slammed the couple’s decision to visit the dangerous country as “unconscionable”.
Boyle is perhaps best known for his brief marriage to the older sister of Omar Khadr, a Guantanamo Bay detainee.
Boyle, the son of an Ottawa tax court judge, was married for about a year to Zaynab Khadr. She’s the eldest daughter of Ahmed Said Khadr, who was accused by the US and Canada of being an associate and financier for the terrorist group Al-Qaeda. Zaynab was once investigated by the Canadian police for terrorism offences.
—IANS