Family held hostage for five years says captors killed their baby daughter

A man who was held hostage with his wife and small children for five years in Afghanistan has said that their captors killed their baby daughter.

Joshua Boyle from Canada and his American wife Caitlan Coleman were backpacking around the country in 2012 when they were kidnapped by the Haqqani network, a group with ties to the Taliban. Ms Coleman was heavily pregnant at the time of their capture. They were rescued by Pakistani troops in the Kurram Valley area of Pakistan this week. They were freed along with three young children, two sons aged four and two and a baby girl who is just a few months old, all of whom were born while the couple was held hostage. Speaking to the press, Mr Boyle said they had had another child, a girl, who was killed by the captors as an infant. They also raped his wife, he said. "The stupidity and the evil of the Haqqani network in the kidnapping of a pilgrim ... was eclipsed only by the stupidity and evil of authorising the murder of my infant daughter. "And the stupidity and evil of the subsequent rape of my wife, not as a lone action, but by one guard, but assisted by the captain of the guard and supervised by the commandant." Explaining why he and his wife were travelling in Afghanistan in the first place, Mr Boyle said they were helping people "who live deep inside Taliban-controlled Afghanistan where no NGO, no aid worker, and no government can reach." Ms Coleman's parents have criticised the couple's decision to travel to Afghanistan, with her father calling it "unconscionable". "What I can say is taking your pregnant wife to a very dangerous place is to me, and the kind of person I am, is unconscionable," Jim Coleman told ABC News this week. "I can't imagine doing that myself. But, I think that's all I want to say about that."