A father said yesterday he believed his son, a British medical student, was among a squad of Islamic State (IS) militants filmed beheading Syrian soldiers in a video posted online on Sunday.
Ahmed Muthana told the Daily Mail newspaper his 20-year-old son Nasser Muthana appeared to be among a group of 16 jihadists who were seen on the video, which also showed the severed head of US hostage Peter Kassig.
“I cannot be certain, but it looks like my son,” said Ahmed Muthana, who lives in the Welsh capital, Cardiff. “He must fear Allah now for killing people. How can he expect to face Allah if he is killing human beings?”
Photo: AFP
The announcement of aid worker Kassig’s death, the fifth such killing of a Western captive by IS, formerly known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, formed part of the 15-minute video that showed the beheadings of at least 14 men the militants said were pilots and officers loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
IS, which is fighting in Iraq and Syria, includes thousands of foreign combatants and has become a magnet for volunteers from Europe and North America, Western intelligence agencies have said.
French Minister of the Interior Bernard Cazeneuve said there was a strong likelihood that a 22-year-old French citizen also appeared in the beheading video.
The British Foreign Office declined to comment.
IS has previously released videos of the beheading of two US and two British men which feature a masked, black-clad militant brandishing a knife and speaking with an English accent, who has been dubbed “Jihadi John” by British media.
Sunday’s video showed most of the killers unmasked and the Daily Mail said the man who appeared to be Nasser Muthana was standing alongside Jihadi John.
Nasser Muthana had already appeared in a online video released in June urging Muslims to join IS.
His younger brother, Aseel, had also traveled to Syria after both were radicalized in Cardiff, his father told the BBC in June. Nasser Muthana’s school friend Reyaad Khan also appeared in the online footage in June, various media reports said.
US President Barack Obama confirmed Kassig’s slaying after a US review of the video.
The 26-year-old Kassig, who founded an aid group to help Syrians caught in their country’s brutal civil war, “was taken from us in an act of pure evil by a terrorist group that the world rightly associates with inhumanity,” Obama said in a statement.
He denounced the extremist group, which he said “revels in the slaughter of innocents, including Muslims, and is bent only on sowing death and destruction.”
The slain hostage’s parents, Ed and Paula Kassig, said they were “heartbroken” by their son’s killing, but “incredibly proud” of his humanitarian work.
Kassig “lost his life as a result of his love for the Syrian people and his desire to ease their suffering,” the parents said in a statement from Indianapolis.
With Kassig’s death, IS has killed five Westerners it was holding. US journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff were beheaded, as were British aid workers David Haines and Alan Henning.
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