An Islamic jihadist group, the Al Nusra Front, has taken responsibility for kidnapping and murdering a Syrian television news anchor.
The journalist, anchorman Mohammed al-Sa'eed, was abducted from his home in Damascus province on July 19, according to communiques posted by the group on jihadist forums.
Sa'eed, who worked as a broadcaster for Syria's state-run television, was executed following an interrogation, the group stated, according to a report Sunday by the SITE monitoring group, which tracks Jihadist websites.
"Perhaps this operation and others will serve as an example to all who support this tyrranical regime, so that they may repent to God,” SITE quoted from the communique. "Otherwise, the swords of the mujahedeen will cut off their heads and purify the Levant (Syria) from their obscenity.”
The Islamist Muslim Brotherhood group has been supplying the opposition forces with arms, according to a report in the London Telegraph. In addition, Arutz Sheva reported last week that the Muslim Brotherhood’s deputy leader vowed that Syria will become an Islamic state after the presumed fall of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. The Islamist terrorist political party which won the elections in Egypt is now raising funds to arm Syrian rebels, who are fighting among themselves as well as against Assad.
The Al Nusra Front group, meanwhile, claimed in a separate communique that its members had stormed and destroyed a police station in an operation with a unit of the Free Syrian Army, the Al Sahaba Battalion, in Jdeidat Artouz near Damascus. Equipment and weapons had been captured there, the statement said.
Al Nusra Front has said it was responsible for bombings in Damascus and Aleppo, starting from last December.
The group has also said it was responsible for the bombing of the pro-government Ikhbariya television channel headquarters on June 27. Seven people died in the blast.
Earlier, Al Nusra Front claimed responsibility for the massacre of 13 men who were found shot to death, execution style, having been bound. The bodies were found in the city of Deir al-Zor, in eastern Syria, on May 29. United Nations monitors condemned the murders as “appalling and inexcusable.”