An image posted online appears to show that ISIS captive Tomislav Salopek of Croatia has been beheaded, the SITE Intelligence Group said Wednesday.
Salopek was kidnapped July 22 in the area of Cairo, according to his employer and the Croatian government.
CNN could not independently confirm the authenticity of the image, and Croatian and Egyptian officials have not confirmed Salopek’s death.
In a video distributed online August 5, a group claiming to be ISIS’ branch in the Sinai Peninsula threatened to kill Salopek if Egypt didn’t release female Muslim prisoners in 48 hours.
Kneeling in a jumpsuit in front of a masked, knife-holding man in camouflage, the hostage identified himself as Salopek and read from a paper, saying he was captured July 22 and worked for a French geoscience firm.
Ardiseis Egypt, part of the French firm CGG, said the hostage in the video appears to be Salopek, who it says was a subcontracted worker abducted last month in Cairo.
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. The ministry identified the captive in subsequent news releases as Salopek.
“It is with horror that I am learning about the announcement from the Daesh terrorist group of the execution of a Croatian hostage,” Fabius said in a statement, referring to ISIS by another name. “If confirmed, this awful assassination would demonstrate once again the cowardly nature and barbarity of this terrorist organization.”
He expressed his solidarity with the Croatian government and said France condemned terrorism “in all its forms.”
Releasing gruesome videos and photographs has become the hallmark of the terrorist group, one of the most brutal to emerge in living memory. ISIS has released photos of young men being shot as well as videos of beheadings, of a captive being burned alive and of prisoners in a cage being gradually submerged until they drowned.
