French ‘IS executioner’ killed: sources

PARIS: Maxime Hauchard, a French jihadist sought by French and US authorities since emerging in an Islamic State execution video in Syria, has been killed, sources close to the inquiry told AFP on Thursday.

“The date and circumstances of his death aren’t yet known, but it appears he died in the summer of 2017,” one of the sources said.Hauchard, who grew up in a village in Normandy before converting from Catholicism to Islam, was just 22 when he was seen holding a knife to the neck of US aid worker Peter Kassig in a gruesome video from November 2014.

The video also showed the execution of 18 Syrians identified as military personnel.France soon issued an international arrest warrant, and the US State Department added Hauchard to its black list of “specially designated global terrorists”.

Investigators later found that Hauchard became radicalised online, joining jihadist forums under the moniker Abu Abdallah al Faransi (“the Frenchman”). He twice travelled to Mauritania between October 2012 and May 2013 for studies in Salafism, the highly conservative branch of Islam.

In August 2013 he left for Syria via Turkey, telling his family he wanted to “help the wounded” in the country’s civil war, but in fact he was taken under the wing of IS recruiters.“To show allegiance, you must first go to a training camp. The first stage lasts around a month. We do some training, we go on operations and after that we return to training.