An Algerian armed group has kidnapped a Frenchman and threatened to execute him unless Paris halts air strikes in Iraq on fighters from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, the group said in a video posted online.
In a video that appeared on social media, a masked member of a group calling itself Jund al-Khilafah, or Soldiers of the Caliphate, warned French President Francois Hollande that it would murder the hostage if France doesn't end its military actions against the Islamic State group in the next 24 hours.
The group said it was answering a call by IS spokesman Abu Muhammad al-Adnani to attack Americans and Europeans.
The hostage, Herve Pierre Gourdel, white-haired and bespectacled, is shown squatting on the ground flanked by two hooded men clutching Kalashnikov assault rifles, as he asks for French President Francois Hollande to intervene, the AFP news agency reported.
He said that he arrived in Algeria on September 20, and kidnapped a day later.
"I am in the hands of Jund al-Khilifa, an Algerian armed group. This armed group is asking me to ask you (President Francois Hollande) to not intervene in Iraq. They are holding me as a hostage and I ask you Mr President to do everything to get me out of this bad situation and I thank you."
The French Foreign Ministry and the French presidency acknowledged Gourdel's kidnapping in a statement saying that President Francois Hollande spoke to Algerian prime minister Abdelmalk Sellal.
Al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb has remained loyal to the central al-Qaida movement, led by Egyptian Ayman al-Zawahri and located along the Afghan-Pakistani border.
The rise of groups claiming allegiance to the Islamic State group is the latest sign of al-Qaida's weakening influence in the face of its new rival's successes on the battlefield.
According to the Algerian Interior Ministry, the Frenchman and two Algerian companions were driving through the mountains near the village of Ait Ouabane when they were stopped by a group of armed men Sunday evening.
The gunmen released the Algerians and took the Frenchman, whom the ministry described as a 55-year-old mountain guide. The three had spent the night at a ski lodge near the town of Tikdjda, 110 kilometers (65 miles) from the capital, Algiers.
On Sunday, IS spokesman al-Adnani urged followers to kill Europeans and Americans, and "especially the spiteful and filthy French." The group has already beheaded two American journalists and a British aid worker.
Responding to the statement at the time, French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said he was confident of the country's security.
"This threat to kill civilians, added to the execution of hostages and to the massacres, is yet another demonstration of the barbarism of these terrorists, justifying our fight without truce or pause," Cazeneuve said Monday.
Prior to the kidnapping Monday, France's Foreign Ministry issued a statement saying Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius had called on ambassadors in 30 countries — many in Africa and the Middle East, and including Algeria — to "invite our compatriots to reinforce their vigilance in the face of the terrorist risk."
Algeria has been battling Islamist militants since the 1990s and in recent years has confined them to a few mountainous regions in the north of the country and in the Sahara desert in the extreme south.
Al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb made millions of dollars over the last decade kidnapping Western tourists in the Sahara Desert.
In January 2013, another al-Qaida splinter carried out a daring assault on an Algerian natural gas plant, taking dozens of foreigner workers hostage, who were all later killed when the military retook the plant.
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