WASHINGTON: The mother of an American worker suspected of beheading one of several colleagues he had tried to convert to Islam has broken her silence, apologising in a video posted online.

Alton Nolen, 30, is due to be charged on Monday with first-degree murder, as well as assault and battery with a deadly weapon. He may also face federal charges.

It was after being fired from his job at the Vaughan Foods in an Oklahoma City suburb that Nolen went on a frenzied knife rampage, severing the head of a colleague and wounding another before being shot by his former boss.

“My heart is just so heavy right now,” his mother Joyce Nolen said in the video posted on Facebook.

“That’s not my son”. The incident came in the wake of a series of beheadings of Western captives by militant fighters in the Middle East and Algeria, but US officials have not confirmed any link to the Oklahoma case. Nolen had recently converted to Islam.

Published in Dawn, September 30th , 2014