In a latest video released by an affiliate group of Islamic State (ISIS), has threatened to kill a Croatian hostage if Egypt fails to release female Muslim prisoners in 48 hours.
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The video shows Salopek kneeling in the desert before a knife-wielding masked man in military fatigues and next to a black Islamic flag often used by the extremists. They want to substitute me with the Muslim women arrested in Egyptian prisons.
Salopek, wearing an orange jumpsuit, did not say when the countdown began.
He was taken hostage in Cairo, while driving to work in a company vehicle, on a road where no similar incidents had been recorded before.
“Ardiseis Egypt acknowledges that he is the hostage appearing on the video released today by the Sinai Province of Islamic State”, the company said in a statement on Wednesday.
Croatia’s Foreign Ministry confirmed that one of its nationals was kidnapped in Cairo last month.
“The armed group stopped his vehicle, forced the driver out and drove away in an unknown direction”, the ministry said at that time, without elaborating and identifying him only as T.S.
The ministry also informed Salopek’s family about his situation.
Wilayet Sinai is the Arabic name for Sinai Province.
The Egyptian government had no immediate comment on the video Wednesday.
He seems to be referring to ladies arrested in a sweeping authorities crackdown after Egypt’s Islamist President Mohamed Morsi was deposed two years in the past in a popularly supported army coup.
Hundreds more were sentenced to death after speedy trials, denounced by the United Nations as “unprecedented in recent history”. “If not, the soldiers from Wilayat Sinai will kill me”. Now they call themselves “an official province” of IS in Egypt.
The mass murder of the Egyptian Christians prompted air strikes by Cairo targeting IS inside Libya.
The timing of the video came as Egypt prepared to inaugurate the New Suez Canal, a megaproject that is the centerpiece of President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’s plans to revitalize the country’s economy.
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Completion of the new waterway within just one year is being touted as a landmark achievement, rivalling the digging of the original Suez Canal that opened in 1869 after nearly a decade of work.
