WATCH: French President Francoise Hollande said the country is in mourning over the murder of Herve Gourdel but France remains fully committed to the fight against ISIS
French President Francois Hollande has confirmed the killing of a French hostage in Algeria.
A video released by a U.S. terrorism watchdog showed Algerian extremists allied with the Islamic State group decapitating a hostage after France ignored their demand to stop airstrikes in Iraq.
The group, which calls itself Jund al-Khilafah, said after abducting Herve Gourdel on Sunday that he would be killed within 24 hours unless France ended its airstrikes against Islamic State fighters in Iraq.
The French government has insisted it will not back down.
Hollande told reporters Wednesday that the hostage was cruelly “assassinated” because he was French and because his country was fighting terrorism and defending human liberty against barbarity.
He spoke on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly which he is attending.
READ MORE: Obama calls for dismantling Islamic State ‘network of death’
In the video, masked gunmen from the newly formed group that split away from al-Qaida’s North Africa branch, pledged their allegiance to the leader of the Islamic State group, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and said they were fighting his enemies. They criticized the French attacks in Iraq as well as its intervention against radical Islamists in Mali.
Terrorism watchdog SITE Intelligence Group said the video had been posted on social networking site Twitter.
Gourdel – a 55-year-old mountaineering guide from Nice – was seized in the Djura Djura mountains of northern Algeria on Sunday during a hiking trip. His Algerian companions were released.
Algerian forces unleashed a massive search for him in the remote mountainous region that is one of the last strongholds of Islamic extremists in Algeria.
The video resembled those showing the beheadings of two American journalists and a British aid worker in recent weeks, but instead of starting with clips of President Barack Obama speaking, it showed French President Francois Hollande.
READ MORE: Wife of aid worker held by Islamic State says she received plea from him
France started airstrikes in Iraq on Friday, the first country to join the U.S. military campaign against the Islamic State fighters there.
Algeria has been fighting Islamic extremists since the 1990s and in recent years they had been largely confined to a few mountainous areas, where they have concentrated on attacking soldiers and police while leaving civilians alone.
The killing of a hostage represents a departure for radical Islamic groups in Algeria which in the past decade have made millions of ransoming hostages.
The new group split away from al-Qaida’s North Africa branch and declared allegiance to the al-Baghdadi’s group in Iraq and Syria and has apparently adopted their tactic of killing hostages.
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