ISIL Says US Hostage Killed in Air Strike in Syria
TEHRAN (Tasnim) - Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) group said an American woman hostage it was holding in Syria was killed when Jordanian fighter jets bombed a building where she was being held, but Jordan expressed doubt about the militant group's account of her death.
In Washington, US officials said they could not confirm that the woman, 26-year-old humanitarian worker Kayla Mueller of Prescott, Arizona, had been killed.
Her family said in a statement on Friday they are hopeful she is alive and asked ISIL to contact them.
Mueller was the last-known American hostage held by ISIL, which controls wide areas of Syria and Iraq.
The group has beheaded three other Americans, two Britons and two Japanese hostages - most of them aid workers or journalists - in recent months. Mueller was taken hostage while leaving a hospital in the northern Syrian city of Aleppo in August 2013.
The group's latest claim, detailed by the SITE monitoring group, came just days after it released a video on Tuesday showing a captured Jordanian pilot, Mouath al-Kasaesbeh, being burned alive in a cage.
Jordan's King Abdullah, who was in Washington discussing how to deal with ISIL militants when the video was made public, vowed to avenge the pilot's death and ordered a stepped-up military role in the US-led coalition against the group.
Jordan said it had carried out a second straight day of air strikes on Friday on ISIL positions, Reuters reported.
"We are looking into it but our first reaction is that we think it is illogical and we are highly skeptical about it. ... It's part of their criminal propaganda," government spokesman Mohammad Momani said in response to ISIL's account of what happened to Mueller.
"How could they identify Jordanian war planes from a huge distance in the sky? What would an American woman be doing in a weapons warehouse?" Momani said.
Hours after the release of the video showing the pilot burning to death, Jordanian authorities executed two al Qaeda militants who had been imprisoned on death row, including a woman who had tried to blow herself up in a suicide bombing and whose release had been demanded by ISIL.
