Video purports to show Japanese man beheaded
TOKYO — Japan condemned with outrage and horror on Sunday an online video that purported to show an Islamic State militant beheading Japanese journalist Kenji Goto.
The video posted on militant websites late Saturday Middle East time ended days of negotiations to save the man and heightened fears for the life of a Jordanian fighter pilot also held hostage.
“I feel indignation over this immoral and heinous act of terrorism,” Prime Minister Shinzo Abe told reporters after convening an emergency Cabinet meeting. “When I think of the grief of his family, I am left speechless.”
The White House released a statement in which President Obama also condemned “the heinous murder” and praised Goto’s reporting, saying he “courageously sought to convey the plight of the Syrian people to the outside world.”
The fates of Goto, a 47-year-old freelance journalist, and the Jordanian pilot, Lt. Muath Kaseasbeh, had been linked by the militants, but Saturday’s video made no mention of the airman. Jordan’s government spokesman, Mohammed al-Momani, declined to comment. Last week, Jordan had offered to free an al Qaeda prisoner for the pilot, but a swap never moved forward.
Saturday’s video, highlighted by militant sympathizers on social media sites, bore the symbol of the Islamic State group’s al-Furqan media arm. Though the video could not be immediately independently verified by the Associated Press, it conformed to other beheading videos released by the extremists.
The video, called “A Message to the Government of Japan,” featured a man who looked and sounded like a militant with a British accent who has taken part in other beheading videos by the Islamic State group. Goto, kneeling in an orange prison jumpsuit, said nothing in the roughly one-minute-long video.
Officials in Japan and the U.S. said they were trying to confirm the authenticity of the video.
Goto was captured after he traveled to Syria in October to try to win the release of Haruna Yukawa from the Islamic State group. Yukawa reportedly was killed previously, though authorities have yet to authenticate that video.
The Jordanian pilot was captured after his fighter plane went down in December over an Islamic State-controlled area of Syria.
Last week, Jordan had offered to release the al Qaeda prisoner — Sajijda al-Rishawi, 44 — for the pilot. In a purported online message earlier, the militants threatened to kill the pilot if the prisoner wasn’t released by Thursday. That deadline passed, and the families of the pilot and the journalist were left waiting in agony. Jordan and Japan had reportedly conducted indirect negotiations with the militants through Iraqi tribal leaders.
Al-Rishawi faces death by hanging in Jordan for her role in triple hotel bombings in Amman in 2005. Sixty people were killed in those attacks, the worst terror attack in Jordan’s history.