British aid employee beheaded by radicals
The Islamic State group released a video Saturday of the third beheading of a foreign hostage, a British aid worker.
The execution was a clear message to Britain, a key ally of the U.S. as it builds an international coalition to target the militant group, which has made stunning advances across Syria and northern Iraq in recent months.
The video shows the aid worker, David Cawthorne Haines, kneeling on a bare hill under the open sky, in a landscape that appears identical to where two American journalists were killed by the group in back-toback-executions in the past month. In the moments before his death, the 44-year-old Haines is forced to read a script, in which he blames Prime Minister David Cameron and other British leaders for his killing.
The video ends with the black-clad executioner, who spoke English with what sounded like a British accent, identifying their next victim as Alan Henning, another British citizen. Site Intelligence, which tracks jihadist groups, said the executioner appeared to be the same man who killed the American hostages.
President Obama, in a statement released Saturday, said the United States strongly condemned “the barbaric murder” of Haines.
Obama announced a major expansion of the military campaign against the Islamic State last week, including air strikes against the group in Syria. The beheadings of the two Americans, James Foley on Aug. 19 and Steven Sotloff on Sept. 2, followed the start of air strikes against Islamic State positions in Iraq.
The group is holding Henning and another British citizen, as well as two other American aid workers. Their families have asked the news media not to disclose their names, after the Islamic State warned that the hostages would die if relatives made their identities public.
Cameron denounced the killing on Twitter: “The murder of David Haines is an act of pure evil.”
Britain and the United States are among the only nations in the world that have held to a hard-line, no-concessions policy when dealing with kidnappings by terrorist groups. Cameron this month ruled out paying a ransom for Haines, who was kidnapped 19 months ago in northern Syria.