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Alan Henning AP Photo/PA Wire
Hostage

Wife of British taxi driver captured by Islamic State pleads with captors to release him

“I cannot see how it could assist any State’s allow the world to see a man like Alan dying,” she said.

THE WIFE OF a British taxi driver who was captured by Islamic State militants has asked his captors to respond to her messages “before it is too late”.

In a statement released through Britain’s Foreign Office last night, Barbara Henning appealed to the group to release her husband.

Alan Henning, 47, from Salford in northern England was seized during an aid mission to Syria last December.

Members of Islamic State issued their threat to kill him in a video released just over one week ago which showed the beheading of British aid worker David Haines.

Barbara Henning said she has been trying to communicate with the people holding her husband but no-one has responded to her messages.

“I pray that the people holding Alan respond to my messages and contact me before it is too late,” she said.

She asked his captors not to kill him. “I cannot see how it could assist any State’s cause to allow the world to see a man like Alan dying,” she said.

She described her husband as a “peaceful, selfless man,” who had travelled to Syria as “an act of sheer compassion”.

Alan Henning left his job to drive a convoy to Syria with his Muslim colleagues, and had been driving an ambulance stocked with food and water when he was taken, Barbara Henning said.

The Islamic State group, which now controls around one-third of Syria and Iraq, has already beheaded two US journalists and a British aid worker, and has threatened to kill another British journalist as well as Alan Henning.

Read: France is the first nation to join the US in attacking Islamic State… > 

Read: “He was a hero” – Condemnation after Islamic State beheads British hostage > 

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