Iraq Foreign Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari on Monday said there is no “substantial evidence” whether the 39 Indians who were taken hostage by the Islamic State group in Mosul in 2014 were killed or are still alive, Hindustan Times reported. Al-Jaafari, who is on an official four-day visit to India, met External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj at the Jawaharlal Nehru Bhawan on Monday.

“We have no substantial evidence that they [the Indians] were killed or they are still alive, so we cannot give anything in that regard,” al-Jaafari told reporters after the meeting. He, however, said the country would do its best to find the missing Indians.

In June 2014, it was reported that 40 Indian labourers had been abducted by Islamic State militants from a construction site near Mosul, where they were working. All of them were from low-income families in Punjab.

In November 2014, two Bangladeshi labourers who had been kidnapped along with them were released. They claimed that 39 of the 40 Indians had been shot dead by the ISIS militants, while one managed to escape. Almost immediately, however, External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj had announced that there was no proof of the deaths, and that the government’s search for the abducted Indians would go on.