BAGHDAD – Iraqi authorities have discovered a mass grave with the bodies of38 Indian construction workers abducted when Islamic State militantsoverran the northern city of Mosul in 2014, officials said Tuesday.

The bodies were found buried near the village of Badush, northwest ofMosul, in an area that Iraqi forces recaptured last July.

The killing was a “heinous crime carried out by Daesh terrorist gangs,”Iraqi official Najiha Abdul-Amir al-Shimari told reporters. Daesh is theArabic acronym for the Islamic State group.

The people killed were “citizens of the friendly Indian state. Theirdignity was supposed to be protected, but the forces of evil wanted todefame the principles of Islam,” said Najiha, the head of Iraq’s MartyrsEstablishment, a government body dealing with people killed in the fightagainst the Islamic State group.

The abducted workers, most from northern India, had been employed by aconstruction company operating near Mosul when militants captured wideswaths of northern Iraq in the summer of 2014.

Relatives said they received panicked phone calls from some of the workersfive days after Mosul was captured, asking for help.

Around 10,000 Indians worked and lived in Iraq at that time.

After Iraq recaptured the area, search operations led to a mound of dirtnear Badush, where local residents said bodies had been buried by the IS,Indian foreign minister Sushma Swaraj said in Parliament.

Iraqi authorities used radar to verify that the mound was a mass grave, shesaid, and then exhumed the bodies. Indian authorities then sent DNA samplesfrom relatives of the missing workers.

Forty Indians were captured by the militants, though one man managed toescape. Iraqi authorities said the mass grave held 39 bodies, but only 38have been positively identified through DNA analysis. Analysis on the lastbody has not yet been completed, Swaraj said. – Agencies