ISIS fighters have recently released a new video reportedly showing about 30 Ethiopian Christians being shot and beheaded in Libya.
In the video, the militants referred to the Christians as crusaders and said they were out to kill Muslims. The video later revealed 15 men being beheaded on a beach and another group of the same number shot in their heads in scrubland.
Both groups of men killed were referred to in a subtitle as "worshippers of the cross belonging to the hostile Ethiopian church".
The video also shows a man dressed in black clutching a pistol stood behind some of the victims. Speaking to the camera, he says: "Muslim blood shed under the hands of your religions is not cheap.
"To the nation of the cross: We are now back again."
The video ends with a warning that Christians will not be safe unless they embrace Islam or pay protection money.
Islamic State or ISIS controls large parts of Syria and Iraq and wants to redraw the map of the Middle East. It is unclear how many fighters it has in oil-producer Libya.
A senior Ethiopian official stated that the government was gathering information about the reported killings and would respond when it had more details on the matter. He said Ethiopia had no embassy in Libya presently, making it more difficult to verify the incident.
Fighters professing loyalty to Islamic State have claimed several high-profile attacks on foreigners in Libya this year, including an assault on the Corinthia Hotel in Tripoli and the beheading of 21 Egyptian Christians in February.
The killings of the christian Egyptians prompted Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi to order air strikes on Islamic State targets in Libya.
Egyptian security officials reveals that that an estimate of thousands of militants who share Islamic State’s ideology moved from the Sinai Peninsula to Libya after the army toppled President Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood in 2013.
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