The bodies of 38 of the 39 Indian workers killed in the Iraqi city of Mosul in 2014 reached Amritsar on Monday afternoon. One body was not brought back for now as DNA tests had found only a 70% match, while the others matched over 95%, The Indian Express reported.

Minister of State for External Affairs VK Singh escorted the bodies back to India in a special aircraft. Of the 39 bodies, 31 will be handed over to families in Amritsar and the others were flown to Patna and Kolkata, PTI reported.

“The burden of a few responsibilities are much more than others,” Singh tweeted from Baghdad.

The workers, most of whom were from low-income families in Punjab and Himachal Pradesh, were killed in Mosul by the Islamic State terrorist group, which had kidnapped them in 2014. Harjit Masih, one of the Indian workers who managed to escape and return to India, had earlier described how the hostages had been lined up and shot.

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Singh on Monday said no Indian embassy had any record of the 40 Indians captured by the terror outfit because they had gone to Iraq illegally through travel agents. “When you go through illegal agents, it is difficult to find where one has gone,” the minister told reporters, adding that the government would have tried to save them had it had any information about them.

The government, however, had maintained that the hostages were alive, and that efforts were on to locate them. In July 2017, Minister of External Affairs Sushma Swaraj told Parliament that “it was a sin to assume someone was dead without proof”. But on March 20, she confirmed that “deep penetration radar confirmed that all the Indians were dead after the bodies were exhumed and DNA analysis was completed for all 39 bodies”.

The Congress and other Opposition parties later asked the government why there was a delay in revealing the information. Several Opposition leaders also criticised the government for giving “false hope” to the families for years. On March 22, the Congress decided to move a privilege motion against Swaraj in the Rajya Sabha for allegedly misleading the House.