David Cawthorne Haines
| David Haines | |
|---|---|
| Born |
David Cawthorne Haines 9 May 1970 East Yorkshire, UK |
| Disappeared | March 2013 Atme, Syria |
| Died |
c. 13 September 2014 (aged 44) Syrian desert |
| Cause of death | Decapitation |
| Nationality | British |
| Occupation | Humanitarian aid worker |
David Cawthorne Haines (9 May 1970 – c. 13 September 2014) was a British aid worker who was captured by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) in early 2013 and who was beheaded in early September 2014.
Haines was born in East Yorkshire, moving to Perth, Scotland, as a child and prior to his capture resided in Sisak, Croatia, as a father of two. Haines had been an aircraft engineer in the Royal Air Force before turning to work in humanitarian aid in 1999. He helped victims of conflict in the Former Yugoslavia, Africa and the Middle East. In 2012, he was an unarmed security worker for Nonviolent Peaceforce, a civilian peacekeeping group in South Sudan.
Haines was abducted in March 2013 by an unidentified armed gang while working in a Syrian internally displaced persons (IDP) camp run by the aid group Agency for Technical Cooperation and Development (ACTED). He was kidnapped near the Atmeh refugee camp near the Turkish border and the Syrian province of Idlib. He was seized along with an Italian aid worker named Federico Motka. Their Syrian translator and driver were not taken. The translator later said that insurgents shot out the tires and surrounded their vehicle on a country road.
Haines' family were ordered by UK Foreign Office not to speak to anybody about the abduction, an instruction that continued even after the abduction became public when Haines appeared in the purported Sotloff execution video that threatened Haines would be the next victim. The UK Foreign Office had also requested the British media to not publish Haines' identity, fearing for his safety. When international press published his name after release of the video, UK media decided to also publish it, with The Independent stating that "no purpose is served by continuing to withhold his name".
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