The captors of BBC journalist Alan Johnston balked on Wednesday at demands by Hamas to release him and repeated their threats to kill him if Britain failed to free an Islamist prisoner, the SITE Intelligence Group reported. "Unless they (Britain) respond to these demands, there will be no way out for this captive. If the circumstances worsen, we will approach Allah to see what can be done with this reporter, even if we have to slaughter him," SITE reported a spokesman for the Army of Islam as saying in a video. The video showed four masked men, one reading from a piece of paper, in which he addressed himself to the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades, the armed wing of Hamas. He spoke of Hamas's ousting the forces of Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas's Fatah movement from Gaza and of former Hamas prime minister Ismail Haniya's call for Johnston to be released. He said to them: "Do not be the cause for igniting the fitna (religious conflict) between us, which results will only be known by Allah. Our weapons are aimed only at the chests of the Jews and the Crusaders and their helpers."
The Army of Islam is demanding the release of a Palestinian-born cleric, once labelled Al-Qaeda's spiritual leader in Europe, Abu Qatada, who is being held in Britain. "If we do not reach an agreement and the situation worsens for us, we will have to turn to God and have no choice but to slit the throat of the journalist," a masked spokesman for the group told reporters in Gaza on Sunday.
The warning came as Johnston was spending his 100th day in captivity in the Gaza Strip and as the Islamist group Hamas, which took over the Palestinian territory last week, said it was still working to secure his release.