The Islamic State group claimed that a 26-year-old Arizona woman taken hostage by the group in Syria was killed Friday when a Jordanian fighter plane bombed a building where she was being held.
The claim could not be verified, nor was it clear that Jordanian planes had bombed that location, described as being near Raqqa, the group’s de facto capital. The group released photos showing rubble of a building it claimed had been struck in airstrikes but no images of the hostage, Kayla Mueller.
“The criminal Crusader coalition aircraft bombarded a site outside the city of ar-Raqqah today at noon while the people were performing the Friday prayer,” the Islamic State said in a statement, according to SITE Intelligence Group, which tracks postings by Islamist militant groups. “The air assaults were continuous on the same location for more than an hour.”
Mueller would be the fourth American hostage to die since August while being held by the Islamic State. Her name previously had not been made public at the urging of her family and the FBI, which feared the disclosure could put her in greater danger.
Mueller had moved to an area along Turkey’s border with Syria in late 2012 and worked for a humanitarian organization, known as Support to Life, helping families fleeing the violence in Syria.
In August 2013, she was leaving a hospital run by Spanish Doctors Without Borders in the Syrian city of Aleppo when she was kidnapped.
Mueller’s family later received proof-of-life evidence from her captors as well as an e-mail demanding a ransom of several million euro, according to individuals familiar with the case. The group threatened to kill her if the ransom was not paid by mid-August.
Speaking at an event in Washington, national security adviser Susan Rice said U.S. officials did not have any information to corroborate the claim that Mueller had been killed.
Jordan’s military issued a statement confirming that its air force had carried out multiple strikes against the Islamic State on Friday but providing no other details.
In an interview, a senior Jordanian official expressed skepticism about the Islamic State’s claim and said that the building in the image distributed by the group was a “weapons warehouse.”
The official, Mohammad al-Momani, Jordan’s media affairs minister, did not indicate how he knew that or say whether the building had been targeted by the Jordanian military.
Instead, Momani said that the latest Islamic State claim was “part of their media spinning/PR campaign.”
The militants, he said, “are constantly trying to drive a wedge in the coalition (and) playing with public opinion. We need to be careful not to fall into this trap.”
Mueller was thought to have been held with other Islamic State hostages. Nicolas Henin, a French journalist who was freed in April, said on Twitter on Friday that Mueller was “among the very last of my former cellmates still detained.”
Mueller, a native of Prescott, Ariz., had a desire to help the disadvantaged dating back to high school. She volunteered with the Save Darfur Coalition, according to the Daily Courier, the Prescott newspaper.
She graduated from Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff in 2009. After college, she traveled to India, working in an orphanage and teaching English to Tibetan refugees.
