U.K. police are studying a video released by Islamic State in which a militant with a British accent calls on Muslims back home to join the extremist group’s fight in Syria and Iraq.
The film, featuring a man identified as Abu Saeed al-Britani, was posted on the Internet about the same time yesterday as another showing the beheading of British hostage Alan Henning. Prime Minister David Cameron raised the al-Britani recording in a meeting of intelligence, police and military officials today, his office said in a statement.
Henning, 47, was working for a charity delivering aid to Syria when he was seized in the country last December. He’s the latest foreign captive to be executed on video by Islamic State, the jihadist group that has declared a caliphate on territory it seized in Iraq and Syria.
Cameron described the killing in an e-mailed statement late yesterday as a “brutal murder,” saying it “shows just how barbaric and repulsive these terrorists are.” The U.K. “will do all we can to hunt down these murderers and bring them to justice,” he said. The family of Henning, a taxi driver from Greater Manchester, northern England, today said his murder had left them “numb with grief.”
“We as a family are extremely proud of him and what he achieved and the people he helped,” they said in a statement distributed by the U.K. Foreign Office.
Iraqi Shiite fighters raise their weapons as they take part in a parade in the Shiite shrine city of Karbala in central Iraq, ahead of joining the fight against jihadists of the Islamic State. Close
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Iraqi Shiite fighters raise their weapons as they take part in a parade in the Shiite shrine city of Karbala in central Iraq, ahead of joining the fight against jihadists of the Islamic State.
‘Senseless, Barbaric’
Islamic State says in the video of Henning’s killing that the next hostage to be executed will be Peter Kassig, an American aid worker, Bethesda, Maryland-based SITE Intel said on its website. The parents of the American, who converted to Islam and changed his name to Abdul-Rahman Kassig, released a statement calling on his captors to “show mercy and use their power to let our son go,” Sky News reported today.
Caitlin Hayden, a spokeswoman for the White House National Security Council, confirmed in a statement that Kassig was being held and said the U.S. has no reason to doubt the authenticity of the militants’ video.
Islamic State had warned in a Sept. 13 video that it would kill Henning. That video showed the execution of another U.K. citizen, aid worker David Haines.
Britain “will use all the assets we have, as we have been up to now, to try and find these hostages, to try and help these hostages, to help their families,” Cameron said in a televised statement. The government will “do everything we can to defeat this organization, which is utterly ruthless, senseless and barbaric in the way it treats people.”
Kobani Shelling
In the second video released yesterday, a militant speaking with a British accent is shown seated wearing a camouflage top with a rifle propped at his side. Al-Britani uses the recording to call U.K. and U.S. forces “cowards” for not deploying ground troops to fight Islamic State, and urges British Muslims to travel to the war zone.
Britain last week joined the U.S.-led coalition of European and Arab allies carrying out military strikes against Islamic State positions in Iraq and Syria. The militants and their sympathizers have killed citizens of the U.K., France and the U.S., calling the executions a reprisal for the armed campaign against them.
While the airstrikes have halted Islamic State gains in some areas, the group has advanced on the mostly Kurdish town of Kobani in northern Syria in recent days and seized more territory in western Iraq, according to local officials.
Militants continued to shell the town on the border with Turkey, Ibrahim Ayhan, a pro-Kurdish lawmaker in the Turkish parliament, said by phone today.
Another British hostage, journalist John Cantlie, has appeared in videos posted by Islamic State, criticizing the policy of the U.S. and its allies in the Middle East.
Cantlie’s seriously ill father, Paul, yesterday made a video appeal from his hospital bed for his son’s release.
“To those holding John: please know that he is a good man,” he said. “He sought only to help the Syrian people and I ask you from all that is sacred to help us to allow him to return safely to those he loves and those who love him.”
To contact the reporter on this story: Zaid Sabah in Washington at zalhamid@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Alaa Shahine at asalha@bloomberg.net James Amott, Tony Barrett
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