Islamic State's branch in Egypt's Sinai Peninsula has posted a video depicting the beheading of two men the militant Islamist group says it had found guilty of practising witchcraft and sorcery.
The video, posted on a Telegram channel often used by IS on Tuesday, showed the group forming a religious police unit known as the Hasbah in northern Sinai, where it has waged an insurgency for years. The rugged, thinly populated peninsula borders Israel, Gaza and the Suez Canal.
No comment was immediately available from Egypt's military or Interior Ministry.
In the video, two elderly men appear in orange jumpsuits and are taken out of a black van and led to the desert, where they are beheaded.
A man reads out what he says is a verdict from a Sharia court condemning them to death for "apostasy, sorcery, claiming the ability to tell the future, and leading people to polytheism".
Islamic State uses the terms sorcerers and heretics to refer to adherents of Sufism, a non-violent form of Islam involving mystical rituals that has been practised for centuries.
IS has killed hundreds of soldiers and police in Sinai since 2013, when fighting intensified, but the video shows the militants are expanding their activities to target civilians.
In the video, which is also notable for the fact that the men speaking in it are unmasked, fighters are shown seizing trucks full of cigarettes and drugs, and then burning them.
They are also shown blowing up what they describe as Sufi shrines.
Islamic State has instituted similar religious police units in Syrian and Iraqi territories it controls. The Egyptian branch first showed signs of expanding its goals beyond fighting security forces when in December it bombed a church adjoining Cairo's St Mark's Cathedral, the seat of the Coptic papacy, killing 28 people.
