Syrian ambassador suggests asking Turkey about Russians captured by Islamists in Syria
MOSCOW. Oct 30 (Interfax) - Syria has no information about the Russians held by militants from the Islamic State, said Syrian Ambassador to Russia Riad Haddad.
"Nothing is known about them," Haddad told a press conference in Moscow.
Russia can request this information from Turkey, which maintains contact with IS, the ambassador said.
A Russian traveler, Konstantin Zhuravlyov, went missing in Syria on September 30, 2013, while working on his project "Alone with the desert," a hitchhiking trip from Turkey via Syria into Sahara where he was planning to spend a few weeks.
He was abducted near Aleppo by an Islamist group called Liva at-Tauhid which published a copy of his Russian passport in the media as proof that they were holding him captive. Because Zhuravlyov was in Syria without a visa, the Islamists accused him of espionage.
Yet another Russian, engineer Sergei Gorbunov, disappeared in Syria. Last October a video footage surfaced on the Internet of Gorbunov reading out an appeal to the Russian and Syrian authorities asking them to swap him through the International Committee of the Red Cross for a Saudi subject.
Meanwhile, several media outlets said at the time that IS militants had executed the Russian engineer which, they claimed, had happened as early as this spring.
There were also media reports that the responsibility for the abduction of Gorbunov was claimed by the extremist group called Kataib Muhajireen, which operates near the Syrian city of Aleppo.
