BEIRUT (AP) — The Islamic State group has beheaded Peter Kassig, releasing a video Sunday showing a masked militant standing over the severed head of a man it said was the former U.S. Army Ranger-turned-aid worker, who was seized while delivering relief supplies in Syria last year.
President Barack Obama confirmed Kassig's slaying after a U.S. review of the video, which also showed the mass beheadings of a dozen Syrian soldiers.
The 26-year-old Kassig, who founded an aid group to help Syrians caught 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.