By the Associated Press
Flag of India
(AFP / MANILA BULLETIN)
Around 10,000 Indians worked and lived in Iraq at that time
Indian External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj told lawmakers in Parliament on Tuesday that the bodies were recently found buried in a mound of earth near Badush, a village northwest of Mosul that Iraqi forces had taken back from the Islamic State group last July.
Search operations led to a mound in Badush where local residents said bodies had been buried by the Islamic State group, Swaraj said.
Iraqi authorities used radar to establish that the mound was a mass grave, she said, and exhumed the bodies. Indian authorities then sent DNA samples of relatives of the missing workers.
Swaraj said Iraqi authorities informed the Indian government on Monday that DNA tests confirmed that 38 of them were the kidnapped workers. The DNA test for the remaining body has yet to be fully confirmed.