The militant group ISIS beheaded a man in northern Syria after accusing him of blasphemy, a militant website and a rights group said Tuesday, and threw another off a roof for being gay. The alleged blasphemer was killed Monday in a public square in the town of Sulouk in front of a crowd that included children, the British-based Observatory for Human Rights said.
A statement posted on a jihadi website said the man had admitted to blasphemy before being killed in the countryside of Raqqa province, which the hard-line group controls.
The website included images of crowds at the square. One photo showed a blindfolded man kneeling with his head on a wooden block as a masked man in black raised a sword over his neck.
The group posted photographs Tuesday that appeared to show jihadis throwing a “gay” off a rooftop, then stoning him to death.
“The Islamic court in Wilayet al-Furat decided that a man who has practiced sodomy must be thrown off the highest point in the city, and then stoned to death,” read a statement accompanying the images.
Wilayet al-Furat refers to an area stretching across the Syrian-Iraqi frontier, where the Euphrates flows from Syria into Iraq at the Al-Bukamal-Qaim border crossing.
One image shows a man whom the jihadis claimed was gay being hurled off a building at an unspecified location. The next shows the man lying on the ground.
ISIS in November stoned two men to death in Syria, claiming they were gay.
The Observatory, which tracks the conflict using its own sources on the ground, said last month that ISIS had killed 1,432 Syrians away from the battlefield since the end of June.
