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France: At least 1 Frenchman in Islamic video

18 November 2014 02:51 (UTC +04:00)

Baku-APA. A 22-year-old French convert to radical Islam appears in a propaganda video showing a beheaded American aid worker and the deaths of Syrian soldiers, a Paris prosecutor said Monday,A PA reports quoting Associated Press.

Prosecutor Francois Molins identified the man as Maxime Hauchard, one of at least three young Europeans believed among the cold-eyed fighters on the video as the extremist Islamic State group tries to portray itself as an international movement.

Molins said Hauchard has been on the radar of French authorities since he left for Syria in 2013 and another Frenchman could also be among the fighters in the video but it was too early to tell.

President Barack Obama confirmed the slaying of American aid worker Peter Kassig after a U.S. review of the video, which also showed the mass beheadings of more than a dozen Syrian soldiers.

The overwhelming majority of Islamic State fighters are from the Mideast, but the extremist group is trying to cement its claim on an Islamic empire straddling Iraq and Syria. Europe appears to be a fertile ground to find Islamic State supporters, with officials saying thousands of young Europeans have headed off to jihad.

The latest video lingered on the faces of Frenchman Maxime Hauchard and other knife-wielding extremists lined up behind their kneeling victims. Some had distinctly Asian features, while another whose face was hooded had the familiar London accent of the jihadi who also appeared in beheading videos with American hostages James Foley and Steven Sotloff, and with British hostages David Haines and Alan Henning. There were also indications that a Welsh medical student may be the man standing next to Hauchard.

"It's quite transparent that IS is trying to exaggerate its base of support," said Charlie Winter, a researcher at the Quilliam Foundation in London. "They are trying to show that Muslims from all over the world are protecting their Syrian brethren and their Iraqi brethren."

European officials are trying just as furiously to counter that message.

"I call solemnly and seriously on all our citizens, and notably our young people who are the primary target of the terrorist propaganda, to open your eyes to the terrible reality of the actions of Daesh," said French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve, using an Arabic acronym for the Islamic State group. "These are criminals that are building a system of barbarity."

Hauchard, who is around 22 and from west of Paris, gave an interview to France's BFM television in July, telling the network he had helped capture Mosul, the Iraqi city whose fall eventually prompted the United States to resume military operations in Iraq.

One father from Wales, Ahmed Muthana, said he thinks he saw his son, 20-year-old Nasser Muthana, in the latest video, and a British researcher confirmed the likeness of the jihadi with the Cardiff medical student.

"It resembles him. I was shown a picture of the video. I cannot confirm it is him, but I think it might be," Ahmed Muthana told Britain's Press Association.

Obama denounced the extremist group, which he said "revels in the slaughter of innocents, including Muslims, and is bent only on sowing death and destruction."

The 26-year-old Kassig, who founded an aid group to help Syrians caught up in their country's brutal civil war, "was taken from us in an act of pure evil by a terrorist group that the world rightly associates with inhumanity," Obama said in a statement.