Time Running Out for Croatian ISIS Hostage

Croatian foreign minister Vesna Pusic flew to Cairo on Thursday, accompanied by Salopek's wife Natasa, in a bid to get help from the Egyptian authorities to save Salopek from ISIS.

Salopek's father Zlatko also pleaded with his abductors on Thursday to free his son.

"I appeal the people who are holding my son to release him, so he can return to his family, because the only motive for which he went to your country was to earn money for his children," Zlatko Salopek said.

A video of 31-year-old Salopek was posted online on Wednesday, in which the kneeling captive reads out a message that he will be killed within 48 hours if ISIS's demands are not met, while a masked man holds a knife beside him.

"The soldiers of the Islamic State, the caliphate, Sinai Wilayet [province in Egypt], detained me on July 22, 2015. They want to exchange me for Muslim women who were arrested and are now in Egyptian prisons," Salopek said in the message.

"This must be done within 48 hours, which starts now. Otherwise, soldiers of the Sinai Wilayet will kill me," he said.

Salopek has a wife and two children in Croatia and is employed as a topographer at a French company called Compagnie Générale de Géophysique. The company confirmed on Wednesday that Salopek is their employee and that ISIS contacted them as well, demanding a ransom.

He was taken hostage in Cairo, while driving to work in a company car, on a road where no similar incidents had been recorded before.

Armed men stopped the car and made the driver leave the vehicle. Reportedly however, Salopek was taken by mistake, as the militants thought he was a French citizen.

The Sinai Peninsula in the east of Egypt is a centre of an Islamist insurgency led by a militant group originally...