Beirut: Just days after Lebanon put to rest its first soldier beheaded by the barbaric Islamic State militants, the Sunni extremists claim to have decapitated another soldier, reports said Saturday.
The slain soldier has been identified as Abbas Medlej, a Shiite Muslim and the Lebanese Army is yet to ascertain the authenticity of grisly images of the soldier's beheading circulating on the social media, posted by one of the IS supporters.
However, according to the 20-year dead soldier's mother, the pictures look real, she has told he Associated Press.
According to media reports in Lebanon and Turkey, the Islamic State claimed the beheading in a statement, saying that the soldier was killed because he was trying to escape and also fired on the captors.
"Yes, we slaughtered Lebanese soldier Abbas Medlej because he attempted to escape," the ISIS leader told Turkish news agency Anadolu.
The ISIS commander reportedly said that Medlej said he was going to the bathroom but shot at ISIS members instead.
Medlej's beheading comes just days after his colleague Ali Sayyed, another Lebanese Army soldier, was decapitated by the militants.
Medlej, Sayyed and dozens of other lebanese soldiers were captured by the IS and al-Nusra front when they raided the Lebanese border town of Arsal last month.
According to Lebanese news site the Daily Star, the extremists have offered to release the soldiers in exchange of some militants imprisoned in Lebanon, but the government has rejected the prisoner swap deal.
The IS onslaught in Lebanese town of Arsal is an indicator of how the Islamic State can spread its tentacles beyond Iraq and Syria as the beheading of two Lebanese soldiers is a flagrant example of the spillover of the IS violence.
