CAIRO: Daesh’s Egyptian affiliate published a photograph it said was of the beheaded body of a Croatian hostage it had threatened to kill last week, the SITE monitoring service said on Wednesday.

Croatian Prime Minister Zoran Milanovic said Wednesday he was unable to confirm the death of the hostage.

“At this moment we cannot confirm with 100-percent certainty that this is true and I don’t know if we will be able to confirm that in the coming days, but what we see does not look good, looks horrible,” Milanovic told reporters.

Reuters could not independently verify the authenticity of the picture, which carried a caption that said: “killing of the Croatian hostage, due to his country’s participation in the war against Daesh, after the deadline expired ... .”

If confirmed, it would be the first known beheading of a Western hostage held by Sinai Province, the Egyptian group which changed its name from Ansar Bayt Al-Maqdis after it pledged allegiance to Daesh.

A spokesman at the Egyptian Interior Ministry’s press office said: “We have seen this news on line but are currently making our own checks. If we confirm that it is indeed true, we will inform the media through a statement.”

The Croatian Embassy and Foreign Ministry declined to comment. The photograph, circulating on Twitter accounts of supporters of Sinai Province, shows a man’s severed head placed on his body, with a knife driven into sand next to it and the black Daesh flag in the background.

Next to the picture are screenshots of Arabic language news articles with the headlines: “Croatia confirms its support for Egypt in efforts to fight terrorism and extremism” and “Croatia affirms its continued support for the Kurdistan region.”

Last week, an online video purportedly from Sinai Province showed a man who identified himself as Tomislav Salopek who said the group would kill him in 48 hours if “Muslim women” in Egyptian jails were not freed.

Ardiseis Egypt, a unit of French oil and gas geology company CGG, confirmed that the video showed one of its employees who was kidnapped on July 22 while traveling to Cairo. No immediate comment could be obtained from CGG on Wednesday.

Last December, Sinai Province said it was behind the killing of an American petroleum engineer whose body was found in a car in a desert region almost four months earlier.