Kayla Mueller’s surviving loved ones said they’re convinced her Syrian boyfriend did everything possible to save the Arizona woman’s life.
Dad Carl Mueller told NBC’s “Today” show they appreciate how Omar Alkani, a 33-year-old photographer, “risked his life” to try to pluck the aid worker from ISIS captors.
“Throughout this whole ordeal, there have been very few people that we didn’t doubt at some point — very few that we didn’t doubt had some other motive or ulterior motive,” the heartbroken dad said in an interview aired Tuesday morning.
“But we know he [Alkani] risked his life to try to save her.”
Alkani has said he found where Kayla was being kept and appeared before an ISIS judge, demanding her release and claiming to be her husband.
The two had agreed that if she was ever captured in the Middle East, that she would lie and say she was married to Alkani, he said. The boyfriend believed hardcore Islamists would hand over Kayla to her husband.
But Kayla didn’t lie to the ISIS judge — and loved ones refused to second-guess her decision.
“It could have gone even more wrong had she lied,” her dad said.
Kayla had every chance to lie and secure her lifeline out of ISIS confinement but declined to fib.
Terrorists said the 26-year-old Prescott, Ariz., humanitarian was killed earlier this month in a Jordanian airstrike against an ISIS stronghold.
The US confirmed Kayla’s death days later but wouldn’t confirm ISIS’s claims that she was killed in that airstrike. She was captured in August 2013.