BEIRUT: 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 US 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 US 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.

He denounced the extremist group, which he said “revels in the slaughter of innocents, including Muslims, and is bent only on sowing death and destruction.”

The slain hostage’s parents, Ed and Paula Kassig, said they were “heartbroken” by their son’s killing, but “incredibly proud” of his humanitarian work. Kassig “lost his life as a result of his love for the Syrian people and his desire to ease their suffering,” the parents said in a statement from Indianapolis.

With Kassig’s death, the Islamic State group has killed five Westerners it was holding. American journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff were beheaded, as were British aid workers David Haines and Alan Henning.–AP

-NST