THE Canadian man who was held hostage with his family for five years has said that the Taliban-linked militants who abducted him and his wife in Afghanistan raped her and killed an infant daughter born in captivity.

Giving details of the family’s ordeal after arriving at Toronto airport following a rescue operation mounted on Wednesday by the Pakistani military, Joshua Boyle said they had been kidnapped while trying to deliver aid to villagers in a part of a Taliban-controlled region.

There has been some confusion and questions about events following his release along with Caitlan Coleman and their three children.

Coleman’s father decried Boyle’s decision to visit Afghanistan.

“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 said during an interview in which he also expressed puzzlement at reports that Boyle had refused to board a US military plane after the release, allegedly because he feared possible detention on US soil.

Boyle denied that he had refused to make the return trip and had chosen to fly back from Islamabad to Canada on commercial airlines via London.

Reading out a statement to journalists from a small notebook, he used much of it to hit out at the family’s abductors, the Haqqani network, a group deemed a terrorist organisation by the US.

“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,” Boyle said, in a calm voice which cracked at the mention of the child.

“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.”

He did not elaborate on what he meant by “pilgrim”, or on the murder or rape.