LONDON (AP) – Prime Minister David Cameron says the “completely unforgivable” slaying of a British hostage in Syria demonstrates the necessity of destroying the Islamic State extremist group.
“There is no level of depravity to which they will not sink. No appeals made any difference,” Cameron said Saturday after receiving a security briefing from Foreign Office, intelligence and military officials at Chequers, his official country retreat on the IS killing of English aid worker Alan Henning.
Cameron said the video posted Friday night that showed the 47-year-old Henning reading an anti-Western message before his captor put a knife to his neck demonstrated that IS was repulsive and beyond reason.
“The murder of Alan Henning is absolutely abhorrent, it is senseless, it is completely unforgivable. Anyone in any doubt about this organization can now see how truly repulsive it is, and barbaric it is,” he said of IS.
When asked whether he believed the extremists would kill more of their Western hostages, Cameron suggested the only way to stop them was through military action.
“The fact that this was a kind, gentle, compassionate and caring man who had simply gone to help others, the fact they could murder him in the way they did, shows what we are dealing with,” Cameron said. “This is going to be our struggle now. … We must do everything we can to defeat this organization. We must take action against it. We must find those responsible.”
Henning, a taxi driver from the town of Eccles in northwest England, was abducted minutes after his aid convoy entered Syria in December 2013. He was the fourth hostage killed by IS extremists. In their latest video, Henning’s killers linked their action to a vote last week in British Parliament to approve use of British warplanes to attack IS targets.