Grabar-Kitarovic spoke to reporters in the coastal city of Split. The ministry identified the captive in subsequent news releases as Salopek. In one attack in July, a bomb destroyed part of the Italian consulate in central Cairo.
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An obviously distraught Bilokapic said of Salopek: “He is my friend”.
The German Foreign Ministry condemned the alleged killing of Salopek, saying that “this abhorrent act once again shows that the fanatical ideology of ISIS threatens us all”.
“If these reports are true, I condemn in the strongest terms the apparent brutal killing” of Salopek, British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond said in a statement. In the immediate aftermath, the government moved quickly to condemn all terror groups in the country while also vowing swift vengeance against those responsible. Croatia’s relatively outdated Soviet-era military shares a number of weapons with the Kurdish peshmerga, who have been crucial to the battle against ISIS led by the United States.
If the death is confirmed, it would be the first time that jihadist militants in Egypt have beheaded a Western hostage since stepping up their campaign against the state two years ago. The married father of two was in the area working as an oil and gas sector surveyor. His page says that he’s been with CGG since December 2014 having previously worked for Nageco in Libya.
Croatian Prime Minister Zoran Milanovic on Wednesday afternoon said Croatia could “not confirm with complete certainty that Tomislav Salopek was executed by ISIS” though he suggested it was certainly possible. It came just a day before el-Sissi hosted a much-hyped ceremony with foreign dignitaries to mark the opening of a new section of the Suez Canal.
The photos of Salopek were verified by the terrorism watchdog SITE Intel.
He also appealed for calm.
ISIS had made Salopek’s release contingent on Egypt releasing all Muslim women in its prisons within 48 hours.
Within the aftermath of that strike, President Abdel Fattah Sisi vowed vengeance and hinted that the state may perform demise sentences already handed down towards Morsi and a whole lot of different members of his Muslim Brotherhood, though the Brotherhood had denied any position in Barakat’s killing or different assaults.
The terrorist group has also staged several attacks in some of Egypt’s major cities, including the capital.
Milanovic said Croatian security agencies will continue to try to confirm the veracity of the photograph.
“But what we see does not look good”, he said, adding that his government would not give up searching as long as there was hope.
Barnini says Salopek started working two months ago on a project for a sub-contractor of CGG.
It was not clear where the video, entitled “A Message to the Egyptian Government”, was shot.
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The purported execution got here every week after Salopek’s captors launched a video during which they threatened to kill him until the Egyptian authorities freed jailed feminine Islamists.
