Canadian says couple were kidnapped because wife was pregnant

A couple held hostage for five years by a Taliban-linked network and forced to raise three children while in captivity were initially targeted for ransom because of the impending birth of their first child, the Canadian man at the heart of the case speculated Saturday.

Joshua Boyle said he and his wife Caitlan Coleman heard at least half a dozen reasons why they had been snatched from a village in Afghanistan and held against their will by the Haqqani network over the years they were imprisoned.

The most credible, however, had to do with the fact that Coleman was well into the third trimester of pregnancy at the time of their capture in 2012.

“As near as we can tell, we were targeted to be kidnapped because it was well-known by the eventual-kidnappers that Caitlan was heavily pregnant,” Boyle said in an email sent to the Canadian Press. “They spoke often immediately following the kidnapping that ‘America will pay for you very quickly, America will not want to risk the baby is born here in prison.’”

Boyle said Coleman was the obvious focus of the kidnappers during the first few weeks of captivity, seeing him as secondary.

Kidnappers used to taunt him by saying that the U.S. government was expressing interest in securing Coleman’s release while Canadian officials were showing no interest in his plight, Boyle said. There is no indication as to whether the captors were conveying accurate information at the time.

Their guards’ confidence in a “get-rich-quick scam” began to erode by late November, he said, a month after the couple had been seized and several weeks before the child was born at the end of December 2012.

Coleman would give birth three more times during the following five years, with three of the children surviving and accompanying their parents back to Canada after being liberated by Pakistani commandos.

One of the children, who Boyle described as an infant daughter, was killed in retaliation for his refusal to accept an offer from the kidnappers at some point during the family’s captivity.

Boyle did not elaborate on the offer, but called for his abductors to be brought to justice both for killing his daughter and raping Coleman.

Boyle told The Canadian Press that conditions during the five-year ordeal changed over time as the family was shuffled among at least three prisons.

He described the first as “remarkably barbaric,” the second as more comfortable and the third as a place of violence in which he and his wife were frequently separated and beaten.

Conditions also varied based on the guards on duty, Boyle said, adding that one would allow the family to eat mangoes while another could withhold soap from the group for months at a time.

“We developed a sad joke with each other, that if we said ‘No, no, I think this change will be good because X’ it would invariably turn out to be bad, and when we said ‘No, no, this is bad news because X’ we’d be proven wrong again,” he said.

This certainly proved true on Oct. 11 when commandos stormed the area where the family was being held.

The rescuers were acting on intelligence from the United States indicating the group had been moved to Pakistan.

Boyle provided few details of the rescue other than to say it involved gunfire surrounding a car in which the group was travelling.

He said the rescue was the most dramatic example yet of the pattern of reversed expectations.

“When it became clear that there were bullets ripping into the car we assumed this to be very bad … but by the grace of God, no, it turns out it was the best thing to happen to us in five years,” he said.

In a video released by Pakistan’s military that was filmed before he left that country for home, Boyle said Pakistani security forces positioned themselves between the hostages and their Haqqani network captors to keep the family safe amid the gunfire.

“A major comes over to me while I still have blood on me. The street is chaos and he says to me, ‘In the American media they said that we support the Haqqani network and that we make it possible. Today you have seen the truth. Did we not put bullets in those bastards?’” Boyle recalled, appearing beside his wife and children in the video.

“And so I can say to you I did see the truth, and the truth was that car was riddled with bullets. The ISI (Pakistan’s intelligence agency) and the army got between the criminals and the car to make sure the prisoners were safe and my family was safe. They put them to flight and they ran like cowards. And this is proof enough to me the Pakistanis are doing everything to their utmost.”

The circumstances under which the video was recorded were not immediately clear.

The release came nearly five years to the day since Boyle and Coleman lost touch with their families while travelling in a mountainous region near the Afghan capital, Kabul.

The couple had set off in the summer 2012 for a journey that took them to Russia, the central Asian countries of Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, and eventually to Afghanistan.

Boyle said the couple was helping ordinary villagers in a Taliban-controlled area when they were seized.

The family returned to Toronto aboard an Air Canada flight on Friday night.

Boyle said an initial statement delivered to reporters was delayed due to a “medical emergency” involving one of his children. But Saturday morning, he released a statement to CTV News saying that doctors believe his youngest daughter will recover.

“Our daughter has had a cursory medical exam last night, and hospital staff were enthusiastically insistent that her chances seemed miraculously high based on a quick physical.”

He wrote in the statement that medical work-ups are being arranged for the rest of his family, and that “God-willing”, the physical and mental healing process will soon begin.

With files from The Associated Press

Michelle McQuigge, The Canadian Press