Tuesday, 20 January 2015

ISIS: Give us $200M


The militant group ISIS has threatened to kill two Japanese hostages unless Tokyo hands over $200 million within 72 hours.


On Tuesday in a video a masked man clad in black and holding a knife stands over two kneeling men in orange jumpsuits against the backdrop of a barren landscape.
The masked man links the threat against the two men's lives to Japan's support for the U.S.-led coalition that's fighting ISIS in Iraq and Syria.
Addressing his comments to Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who is currently visiting the Middle East. "Although you are more than 8,500 kilometers away from the Islamic State, you willingly volunteered to take part in this crusade,"
The international community needs to "deal with terrorists without giving into them," Abe said at a news conference in Jerusalem after the release of the video. But he stopped short of explicitly ruling out the payment of a ransom or negotiations with the hostages' captors.
. The Japanese Foreign Ministry in Tokyo said it was working to confirm the authenticity of the video.
The masked man in the video identifies the two kneeling men as Kenji Goto Jogo and Haruna Yukawa.




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