Obama confirms death of Abdul-Rahman Kassig
The 26-year-old American was captured last year
President Barack Obama has confirmed the death of US aid worker Abdul-Rahman Kassig, whose beheading was shown in a video posted by Islamic State (IS).
Mr Obama called the act "pure evil" and offered his condolences to the family of Mr Kassig, 26, who was abducted in Syria last year.
The video, authenticated by the White House, shows a masked man standing over Mr Kassig's severed head.
It also shows a mass beheading of 18 Syrians, who appear to be soldiers.
The president praised Mr Kassig as a humanitarian and said he was "taken from us in an act of pure evil by a terrorist group that the world rightly associates with inhumanity".
"Today we offer our prayers and condolences to the parents and family of Abdul-Rahman Kassig, also known to us as Peter," he added.
Mr Obama's comments came as he flew back to the US from Australia where he was attending the G20 summit.
'British' jihadist
IS, which controls large parts of Syria and Iraq, has now murdered five Western hostages.
The others were Britons Alan Henning and David Haines, and US journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff.
Those killings were carried out by a man believed to be British. That man bears a resemblance to one of the masked militants pictured in the video purporting to show Mr Kassig.
Unlike previous videos released by IS, the latest one shows the faces of many of the jihadis and specifies its location - Dabiq in Syria's Aleppo province.
Mr Kassig was a former US Army Ranger who served in Iraq.
He later trained as an emergency medical technician and founded the Special Emergency Response and Assistance (Sera) organisation, helping to supply camps on both sides of the Syrian border.
He was undertaking a project for Sera when he was captured in October 2013 while travelling to eastern Syria.
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