Elderly Sufi cleric was beheaded by ISIS savages in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, 100-year-old had been kidnapped from in front of his home in Arish city, Images show a masked jihadist using a long sword to carry out beheading, ISIS brutes have beheaded a 100-year-old cleric – after accusing him of practising witchcraft.
The frail prisoner, named as Sufi cleric Sheikh Sulaiman Abu Haraz, was dragged to an executioner’s block in Egypt’s Sinai eninsula. Shocking images show a masked jihadist dressed in black using a long sword to carry out the beheading in front of a crowd of extremists. The killing was one of two executions captured on camera by fanatics from the ISIS-affiliated Ansar Bayt al-Maqdis group. According to Al Arabiya, ISIS-Sinai accused the elderly man of ‘practising witchcraft’.
Haraz was reportedly ‘one of the symbolic Sufi clerics and elders of the Sinai Peninsula. Armed militants had kidnapped him from in front of his home in Arish city. ISIS has had a presence in the region since November 2014 when Ansar Bayt al-Maqdis pledged allegiance to the terror group. In October last year, jihadists bombed a Russian airliner carrying holidaymakers from a Red Sea resort in an attack that crippled the country’s economy. ISIS claimed it brought the plane down saying it had smuggled explosives into the aircraft before its departure from the resort of Sharm El-Sheikh.
All 224 people on board were killed when the bomb went off minutes after the Metrojet A-321 had taken off for the Russian city of Saint Petersburg. It comes after it emerged that 300 ISIS-linked suspects had been referred to a military tribunal over attacks and an alleged plot to assassinate Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi. The 292 suspects are accused of taking part in terror attacks and of plotting to kill both el-Sissi and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Nayef. ISIS affiliates in the northern Sinai Peninsula have carried out scores of attacks in recent years, mainly targeting security forces. The insurgents stepped up their attacks in 2013 when el-Sissi, who was then the army chief, led the overthrow of Egypt’s first freely elected president, the Islamist Mohammed Morsi.