Freed hostage: Haqqani captors raped wife, killed infant daughter

An American woman, her Canadian husband, and their three children arrived in Canada on Friday night after Pakistani security forces freed them from five years of captivity with the Taliban-affiliated Haqqani network. After arriving at the Toronto airport, Joshua Boyle told reporters their captors raped his wife, Caitlan Coleman, and killed the couple’s infant daughter. “The stupidity and evil of the Haqqani network’s kidnapping of a pilgrim and his heavily pregnant wife engaged in helping ordinary villagers in Taliban-controlled regions of Afghanistan was eclipsed only by the stupidity and evil of authorizing the murder of my infant daughter,” he said. Kidnappers snatched Boyle and Coleman on their final leg of a backpacking trip through the region in 2012. They appeared in two videos released by their captors, but little was known about their condition until now. Boyle also told reporters one of his children suffers from poor health, although he didn’t offer more details. U.S. intelligence services helped provide the information that allowed Pakistani forces to free the family. A U.S. military hostage team flew to Pakistan to bring them home, but at the last minute, Boyle refused to board the transport plane. His family said his reluctance stemmed from former ties U.S. officials called a “horrible coincidence”: Boyle was previously married to the sister of a former Guantanamo Bay detainee, whose father served as a senior al-Qaeda financier.