Another day, another atrocity committed by ISIS with the beheading of UK aid worker David Henning, with the release of a video purporting to show the terror group’s murder-by-social media war crime.
Once again it was a picture of a man in a Guantanamo-style orange jump suit kneeling in a bland landscape. The killer’s voice on the YouTube video recording said: “The blood of David Haines was on your hands Cameron,” in a reference to Britain’s prime minister. “Alan Henning will also be slaughtered, but his blood is on the hands of the British parliament.”
Henning then spoke: “Because of our parliament’s decision to attack the Islamic State, I, as a member of the British public, will now pay the price for that decision.”
Reuters report that another, black-clad man later introduces another hostage who he identifies as American Peter Edward Kassig.
U.S. officials confirmed that an American of that name was being held by the militants and said they had no reason to doubt the authenticity of the video, titled “Another Message to America and its Allies.”
“If true, this is a further disgusting murder,” a British Foreign Office spokesman said. “We are offering the family every support possible; they ask to be left alone at this time.”
It is “another demonstration of the brutality” of Islamic State militants if the video proves authentic, Lisa Monaco, assistant to the president for Homeland Security and Counter terrorism, told a White House news briefing.
The beheading of Henning was the fourth such killing of a Westerner by Islamic State, which has seized large swaths of Iraq and Syria and has been blamed for a wave of sectarian violence. Previous Islamic State videos have shown the beheadings of two American journalists and a British aid worker.
