[ABNA.IR] Sotloff's family front man Barak Barfi has claimed that Sotloff-- who had been missing in Syria for nearly two years-- was sold to the ISIL terrorist group by "moderate Syrian rebels" for $50,000."The first thing we have to ask ourselves is that who told the family this and why did they tell the family this?" asked Jim W Dean, managing editor and columnist for Veterans Today.
"Either the family is being used to put out a false version of events or do what's commonly done in intel psyops to put a variety of different scenarios out just to confuse anybody trying to see what has really happened," he added.
"And I have to ask the family if they did not know that he was an Israeli intelligence agent," Dean said.
On September 2, ISIL released a video that purported to show the beheading of Sotloff. In a message, the journalist said that he is "paying the price" for US military intervention in the Middle East.
Dean said, "Until we have a body and we can do a DNA test on it, we have absolutely no proof that he is even dead because the videos are so sophisticated today that these things can be fake."
"There is a long history during the Cold War to make agents disappear and give them a new identity of faking executions," he pointed out.
Israel has said it had prevented local media from reporting that Sotloff was also an Israeli citizen in an effort to reduce the risk to his life after he was seized by ISIL hard boyz in Syria last year. Sotloff, who was Jewish, immigrated to Israel in 2005.