A photograph circulating the social media among ISIS loyalists on Wednesday shows what is claimed by the Islamic State to be the beheading of a Croatian citizen in Egypt.
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That is the only message Vrpolje residents are willing to repeat for now, filtering out from the story facts they don’t want to hear: that his kidnappers had promised to kill him if their demands were not met and that Wednesday’s photo after the alleged execution showed a person wearing a beige jumpsuit resembling the one Salopek had worn in a previous video.
The picture was posted on IS-affiliated Twitter accounts with the caption: “Execution of prisoner from Croatia – which has participated in war on Islamic State – after deadline ended”.
A security official quoted by the official MENA news agency said they could not yet confirm Salopek’s fate.
The Croatian foreign ministry said last month that armed men stopped and kidnapped a Croatian national with the initials T.S.in Cairo while he was driving to work for a French-owned company.
It wasn’t possible to independently verify the authenticity of the image.
However, it bore markings consistent with a filmed hostage demand released last week by the group, which calls itself the Sinai Province of the Islamic State.
An affiliate of the dreaded Islamic state miltant group in Egypt on Wednesday claimed to have beheaded a 30-year-old Croatian hostage and posted a picture of his body at the end of a 48-hour deadline.
Croatian Prime Minister Zoran Milanovic said in a televised speech that authorities couldn’t immediately confirm the killing “but what we see looks horrific”, the Associated Press reported.
Egypt’s Al-Azhar institute, the top center of religious learning for Sunni Muslims, has condemned the killing of Salopek, calling it a “demonic act” contrary to all religion.
Salopek, a surveyor working with France’s CGG Ardiseis, was abducted on July 22. The company has an office in the leafy Maadi suburb, where many expats and diplomats live.
Wilayat Sinai is the name now used by the IS-affiliated Ansar Bait Al-Maqdis, a Sinai-based terrorist organization that has been responsible for dozens of attacks in Egypt since the ouster of former President Mohammed Morsi in July 2013.
But this would be the first time the local Islamic State affiliate has captured and then beheaded a foreigner in Egypt, a major escalation as the country tries to rebuild its crucial tourism industry after years of unrest following the 2011 revolt that toppled autocrat Hosni Mubarak. That came just days after another bomb killed Prosecutor General Hisham Barakat in an upscale Cairo neighborhood.
The Islamic State group holds about a third of Iraq and neighboring Syria in its self-declared “caliphate”.
Last December, Sinai Province said it was behind the killing of an American petroleum engineer whose body was found in a vehicle in a desert region nearly four months earlier. In Syria, its militants have killed foreign journalists and aid workers, starting with American journalist James Foley in August past year.
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Initially, ISIS were thought to have demanded the immediate release of Muslim women locked up in Egyptian jails but they did not clarify who.
