The family of Kayla Mueller, an American woman held captive by the Islamist terror group ISIS, said on Tuesday that it had received confirmation that she is dead.
“We are heartbroken to share that we’ve received confirmation that Kayla Jean Mueller has lost her life,” a statement from the family reads.
“Kayla was a compassionate and devoted humanitarian. She dedicated the whole of her young life to helping those in need of freedom, justice, and peace,” the family said.
Kayla was the last-known American hostage held by Islamic State, which controls wide areas of Syria and Iraq.
On Friday, ISIS claimed that Kayla had been killed in a building that was hit during a Jordanian airstrike on Raqqa, the militants’ de facto capital in Syria. At the time, ISIS offered no proof to back up its claim, other than an image of a building in rubble.
The group had beheaded three other Americans, two Britons and two Japanese hostages – most of them aid workers or journalists – in recent months.
Kayla was taken hostage while leaving a hospital in the Northern Syrian city of Aleppo in August 2013.
The group’s latest claim, detailed by the site monitoring group, came just days after it released a video on Tuesday showing a captured Jordanian pilot, Mouath al-Kasaesbeh, being burned alive in a cage.
