Family: Russian killed by Islamic State spurned militant recruiters
BRATSKOYE - The Russian man beheaded as a spy by the Islamic State group was a moderate Muslim who had rejected attempts by militants to recruit him to fight in the Middle East, his adoptive family told Reuters on Friday.
A video posted online by Islamic State this week showed a man in an orange jumpsuit kneeling as he declared he was a spy for Russian intelligence, and then being beheaded by a man in camouflage fatigues wielding a large knife.
Relatives and Chechen officials named the man as Magomed Khasiev, and said he was born into an ethnic Russia family but had later been adopted into the family in Chechnya, a mainly Muslim region in southern Russia.
"Do you know what he said when he said good-bye for the last time?," his adoptive mother, Markha Khasieva, told Reuters in an interview at the family home. "'Whatever bad things you hear about me, I will never dishonor you. Never believe rumors. You should know one thing: in the end you will learn the truth anyway.' That's how he said good-bye to us," she recalled.
