Doctors Without Borders did not help an American woman kidnapped by ISIS after visiting their hospital in Aleppo, Syria, ABC News has reported. Kayla Mueller died in captivity eighteen months later. The 1999 Nobel Peace Prize winner is “a fabulous organization, and they do wonderful work,” Kayla’s father told ABC News, “but somewhere in a boardroom, they decided to leave our daughter there to be tortured and raped and ultimately murdered.”

ABC’s 20/20 will air Kayla’s story, “The Girl Left Behind,” Friday at 10:00 p.m.

Doctors Without Borders (also known as MSF, from its French name, Medicins Sans Frontiere) responded that they could not safely intervene without endangering others and their work in very dangerous places. In an official statement responding to the ABC News special, MSF explained that it is “an emergency medical organization” and if groups like ISIS thought it negotiated for the release of people outside its staff,

this would increase the risk levels in many locations, put our field staff, medical projects, and patients in danger, and possibly force us to close projects where needs are often acute. It would limit MSF’s ability to provide life-saving care to people caught in dangerous conflicts.

The Kidnapping and Aftermath

In December 2012 Mueller began humanitarian work in Antakya, a city in southern Turkey near the Syrian border. Nine months later, she was kidnapped with a contractor and an MSF staff member on the way to the bus station in Aleppo. She was returning to Turkey after entering Syria to help the contractor, a friend, install electronics at an MSF hospital in Aleppo.

ISIS eventually released the other hostages but held Mueller for ransom, demanding either the release of a prisoner held in America or €5 million. The U.S. refused to negotiate.

While imprisoned by ISIS, she was raped and tortured, suffering “verbal abuse, prolonged isolation, sensory deprivation, stress positions, forced labour,” as well as rape and having her fingernails being ripped out. It was later discovered that she was repeatedly raped by ISIS’s leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who had taken her as a wife. Her death — claimed by ISIS to have been caused by an airstrike — was confirmed in mid-February 2015.

In its official statement, MSF emphasized that Mueller had not been invited to come to their hospital in Aleppo and would have been told not to come. Aleppo is “a very dangerous place, a city at war (as it remains to this day), where the risk level for westerners, and Americans in particular, was very high. MSF’s security policy therefore forbid people from certain countries, including the U.S., from working at or even visiting the hospital. … The prohibition was total and absolute.”

The Withheld Email Address

According to ABC News, Mueller’s parents, Carl and Marsha Mueller of Prescott, Arizona, said MSF “refused to speak with them for months and then withheld critical information provided by freed Doctors Without Borders hostages — information that directly concerned their daughter and was needed in order to begin negotiations for her release.” The “critical information” was an email address ISIS gave two released hostages, both MSF aid workers, to give to Mueller’s parents to begin negotiations for her release, which MSF held for seven weeks.

In its official statement, MSF said it withheld the email address from the parents out of the concern that others would use it and let out the fact that the MSF hostages had smuggled out a letter from Mueller to her parents. If her captors, “well known to harm or kill people almost at whim,” found out about the letter, captives they still held could have been harmed or killed.

Jason Cone, MSF’s executive director in America, told ABC News, “I don’t think there was a moral responsibility” for MSF to work for Mueller’s release. Negotiating for people who don’t work for MSF would “increase the risk to our teams that are already taking grave risks to provide medical care.” They gave the Muellers the address when the last two MSF hostages were freed.

ISIS claimed that Mueller had converted to Islam, but released hostages deny it. Once, when guarded by a group that included Jihadi John, one guard told the other prisoners that she was much smarter than they were because she became Muslim. “And then she was like, ‘No, I didn’t,'” Daniel Rye Ottosen said. “It was very clear that all of us were impressed by the strength that she showed in front of us. That was very clear.”