OTTAWA — Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s office won’t say if it was aware of any criminal investigation into former hostage Joshua Boyle before Trudeau held a private gathering with the family shortly before Christmas.

The meeting, which appears to have been in Trudeau’s Centre Block office, took place just two weeks before police laid 15 charges against Boyle, including eight counts of assault, two counts of sexual assault, two counts of forcible confinement, and one count each of misleading police, uttering death threats and administering someone a noxious substance.

It is not clear when the police investigation began, but the charges range from Oct. 14 — the day after Boyle returned to Canada — to Dec. 30, according to a court document. There is a publication ban on identifying the victims.

Boyle and his then-pregnant wife, Caitlan Coleman, were abducted in 2012 in Afghanistan and held by the Taliban-linked Haqqani network. They were released in Pakistan in murky circumstances in October. Coleman had given birth to three children during captivity, and the family says a fourth pregnancy was terminated by a forced abortion by their abductors.

Although he had previously been married to Zaynab Khadr, the older sister of former Guantanamo Bay detainee Omar Khadr, Boyle has said he and Coleman were only visiting Afghanistan for a backpacking trip, and has since called the Haqqani network “a brutal and sacrilegious gang of criminal miscreants.”

Trudeau met with the Boyle family on Dec. 18. The meeting was not publicized by the government, and only became known when photos were posted on a Twitter account called “The Boyle Family.”

The grainy photos — likely taken on a cellphone — show Boyle, Coleman and their three children meeting with the prime minister. They show Trudeau holding the couple’s infant daughter in his arms.

Citing privacy reasons and an ongoing court case, Trudeau’s office is refusing to say what was discussed in the meeting or whether staff had any knowledge of a criminal investigation into Boyle prior to granting the meeting.

A government official, who would speak only on background, said the meeting had been requested by Boyle, and that Trudeau would grant the same meeting to any Canadian who had gone through a similarly harrowing experience.

Though there are numerous cases of Canadian hostages being rescued over past two decades, there does not appear to be a recent example where former hostages were brought into the prime minister’s office for a meeting.

Four senior staff who collectively worked for prime minister Stephen Harper between 2006 and 2015 told the National Post they couldn’t recall any case where Harper had such a meeting.

They said Harper typically had phone calls with newly rescued hostages, including with James Loney and Harmeet Singh Sooden (released from Iraq in 2006), Mellissa Fung (released from Afghanistan in 2008), and Bob Fowler and Louis Guay (released from West Africa in 2009).

Howard Anglin, who worked as a senior aide in Harper’s office from 2013 to 2015, said that even aside from the question of whether a criminal investigation was underway, Boyle’s past would have ruled out any in-person meeting.

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“I can’t imagine any circumstances under which anyone on Harper’s staff would have advised him to meet Boyle, and can even less imagine him agreeing to it if they had,” he said.

“The Khadr family connection alone would have been a non-starter, not to mention the insanity of taking his pregnant wife to a Taliban-controlled province of Afghanistan.”

Dan McTeague, who was the point person for hostage situations while parliamentary secretary under prime minister Paul Martin, said he couldn’t recall any such meeting by either Martin or his predecessor, Jean Chrétien.

McTeague said the Boyle meeting was clearly meant as a “human gesture” by Trudeau, but said it raises questions about what his staff knew ahead of time and whether Trudeau was fully briefed.

Although Trudeau’s office has said the conversation was private, Boyle has posted about it on social media and told reporters that they discussed the Haqqani network and the death of his infant daughter, who they named Martyr Boyle.

“We can fill him in on things that he’s curious about and we can fill him in on things and he can fill us in on things we’re curious about,” he told the Telegraph-Journal, a newspaper in New Brunswick, where he had lived before leaving for Afghanistan.

“We’ve had five years living on the other side of the world in a completely different paradigm that most people don’t know much about and don’t know how to deal with it, interact with it, handle it.”

Boyle made a brief appearance in court on Wednesday by video link, and has his next court date scheduled for Monday.

With files from the Ottawa Citizen’s Gary Dimmock.

• Email: bplatt@postmedia.com | Twitter: btaplatt