Christophe de Margerie, the charismatic CEO of Total SA who dedicated his career to the multinational oil company, was killed at a Moscow airport when his private jet collided with a snowplow whose driver was drunk, Russian investigators said Tuesday.

Three French crew members also died when the French-made Dassault Falcon 50 burst into flames after it hit the snowplow during takeoff from Moscow's Vnukovo airport at 11:57 p.m. Monday local time.

Tatyana Morozova, an official with the Investigative Committee, Russia's main investigative agency, said investigators are questioning the snowplow driver, who was not hurt, as well as air traffic controllers and witnesses.

"At the current time, it has been established that the driver of the snowplow was in a state of alcoholic intoxication," Morozova said.

NTV television showed the charred plane lying on a grassy field. Though it had snowed earlier Monday in Moscow, it was unclear how much snow remained at the airport at the time of the crash.

De Margerie, 63, was a regular fixture at international economic gatherings and one of the French business community's most outspoken and recognizable figures. His trademark silver handlebar earned him the nickname "Big Mustache."

A critic of sanctions against Russia, he argued that isolating Russia was bad for the global economy. He traveled regularly to Russia and recently dined in Paris with a Putin ally who is facing EU sanctions over Russia's involvement in the crisis in Ukraine.

According to the Kremlin, Russian President Vladimir Putin sent a telegram to his French counterpart Francois Hollande, lauding de Margerie for being at the "origins of the many major joint projects that have laid the basis for the fruitful cooperation between Russia and France in the energy sphere for many years."

Hollande expressed his "stupor and sadness" at the news. In a statement, he praised de Margerie for defending French industry on the global stage, and for his "independent character and original personality."

De Margerie started working for Total in 1974 after receiving his degree because it was close to home. It was a difficult time to join the firm as the oil embargo, which led to a fourfold increase in prices, was coming to an end.

"I was told 'You have made the absolute worst choice. Total will disappear in a few months,'" he said in a 2007 interview with Le Monde newspaper.

De Margerie rose through the ranks, serving in several positions in the finance department and the exploration and production division before becoming president of Total's Middle East operations in 1995. He became a member of Total's policy-making executive committee in 1999, CEO in 2007, before adding the post of chairman in 2010.

He was a central figure in Total's role in the United Nations oil-for-food program in Iraq in the 1990s. Total paid a fine in the U.S., though de Margerie was acquitted in France of corruption charges.

Under his leadership, Paris-based Total claims it became the fifth-largest publicly traded integrated international oil and gas company in the world, with exploration and production operations in more than 50 countries.

On Monday, de Margerie took part in a meeting of Russia's Foreign Investment Advisory Council with members of Russia's government and other international business executives.

Jean-Jacques Guilbaud, Total's secretary general, said the group would continue on its current path and that the board would meet in coming days to discuss who will succeed de Margerie. Total planned a minute of silence in its offices worldwide at 2 p.m. Paris time.

After dipping slightly early Tuesday, Total's share price was trading 2 percent higher, in line with the broader rally in French stocks.

AP) — French President Francois Hollande has confirmed the killing of a French hostage in Algeria.

A video released by a U.S. terrorism watchdog showed Algerian extremists allied with the Islamic State group decapitating a hostage after France ignored their demand to stop airstrikes in Iraq.

The group, which calls itself Jund al-Khilafah, said after abducting Herve Gourdel on Sunday that he would be killed within 24 hours unless France ended its airstrikes against Islamic State fighters in Iraq.

The French government has insisted it will not back down.

Hollande told reporters Wednesday that the hostage was cruelly "assassinated" because he was French and because his country was fighting terrorism and defending human liberty against barbarity.

He spoke on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly which he is attending.

Gourdel was a 55-year-old mountaineering guide from Nice. He was snatched by militants while hiking in the North African country.

(Reuters) - Algerian militants have beheaded French tourist Herve Gourdel, who was kidnapped by gunmen on Sunday in what the group said was a response to France's action against Islamic State militants in Iraq.

In a video released by his captors, Gourdel, a 55-year-old from Nice, is seen kneeling with his arms tied behind his back before four masked militants who read out a statement in Arabic criticising France's intervention.

They then pushed him on his side and held him down. The video does not show the beheading, but a militant later holds the head up to the camera.

"This is why the Caliphate Soldiers in Algeria have decided to punish France, by executing this man, and to defend our beloved Islamic State," one of the militants says in the statement he read out.

France's President Francois Hollande confirmed the death of Gourdel, and vowed that French military operations against Islamic State would continue.

"Our compatriot has been killed cruelly and in a cowardly way by a terrorist group. Herve Gourdel was assassinated because he was French," Hollande, visibly shaken by the events, said at the United Nations. "My determination is total, and this aggression only strengthens it. France will continue to fight terrorists everywhere. The operations against Islamic State will continue."

The Caliphate Soldiers, a splinter group linked to Islamic State militants in Iraq and Syria, had on Monday published a video claiming responsibility for the abduction and showed the man identifying himself as Gourdel.

The kidnapping had come after Islamic State spokesman Abu Muhammad al-Adnani urged the group's followers to attack citizens of the United States, France and other countries that joined the coalition to destroy the radical group.

Just before the militants gave their statement in the video, the Frenchman told his family that he loved them.

There was no immediate comment from Gourdel's relatives, but a friend, Eric Grinda, told France's i-Tele television: "They want to fan the flames of hatred and to make us want to respond. They only are able to do one thing, assassinate a man on his knees with his hands tied ... My sadness is immense."

France launched its first air strikes targeting Islamic State targets in Iraq on Friday. It has said all must be done to rid the region of the group.

France raised the threat level at 30 of its embassies across the Middle East and Africa on Monday.

DEEPENING ISLAMIST RIVALRIES

Western diplomats and intelligence sources say they believe there are fewer than 10 Western hostages still held by Islamic State. The group has recently beheaded two Americans, James Foley and Steven Sotloff, and one Briton, David Haines, and threatened to kill another Briton, Alan Henning.

The Frenchman's kidnapping was one of the first abductions of a foreigner by militants in Algeria since the North African country ended its decade-long war with Islamist fighters in the 1990s.

There have, however, been many attacks in the Maghreb region carried out by armed Islamists. In January 2013, al Qaeda-linked militants took more than 800 people hostage at a gas facility near In Amenas, Algeria. Algerian special forces raided the site, but 40 workers were killed, all but one of them foreigners, along with 29 militants.

Gourdel, a French nature guide and photographer, was taken hostage when militants stopped his vehicle in the remote mountains east of Algiers where he planned a hiking trip, according to Algeria's interior ministry.

Algerian troops had launched a search for Gourdel in the mountains in an area known as the "Triangle of Death" during the bloody days of Algeria's 1990s war with Islamists. Though attacks from Islamists are rarer, al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb and other groups are still active. The Caliphate Soldiers group earlier this month announced it had broken with al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, known as AQIM, to back Islamic State, in another illustration of deepening rivalries between Islamic State and al Qaeda's core leadership. AQIM central region commander Khaled Abu Suleimane, who claimed leadership of the Caliphate Soldiers, is a hardliner who has consistently refused peace agreements with the government and traces his militant roots back to the 1990s war.

In that war, 200,000 were killed, as militants fought a bloody campaign - cutting throats, massacring villages and kidnapping civilians - to overthrow the government and install an Islamic state in Algeria.

(Reuters) - Islamic State urged its followers on Monday to attack citizens of the United States, France and other countries which have joined a coalition to destroy the ultra-radical group.

Islamic State spokesman Abu Muhammad al-Adnani also taunted U.S. President Barack Obama and other Western "crusaders" in a statement carried by the SITE monitoring website, saying their forces faced inevitable defeat at the insurgents' hands.

The United States is building an international coalition to combat the extremist Sunni Muslim force, which has seized large expanses of territory in Iraq and Syria and proclaimed a caliphate erasing borders in the heart of the Middle East.

Adnani said the intervention by the U.S.-led coalition would be the "final campaign of the crusaders", according to SITE's English-language transcript of an audio recording in Arabic.

"It will be broken and defeated, just as all your previous campaigns were broken and defeated," Adnani said, according to the recording, which urged followers to attack U.S., French, Canadian, Australian and other nationals.

French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said the group's call showed once again, "if it needed to be shown, the barbarity of these terrorists, and shows why we must fight them relentlessly..." In a statement, he added, using an Arabic acronym for the militants: "We must also eliminate the risk that Daesh represents to our security."

U.S. and French warplanes have struck Islamic State targets in Iraq, and on Sunday the United States said other countries had indicated a willingness to join it if it goes ahead with air strikes against the group in Syria too.

Washington has also committed $500 million to arm and train Syrian rebels and to send 1,600 U.S. military advisers to Iraq to help fight Islamic State, while stressing the U.S. personnel would not engage in combat.

Adnani mocked Western leaders over their deepening military engagement in the region and said Obama was repeating the mistakes of his predecessor, George W. Bush.

"If you fight it (Islamic State), it becomes stronger and tougher. If you leave it alone, it grows and expands. If Obama has promised you with defeating the Islamic State, then Bush has also lied before him," Adnani said, according to the transcript.

"DRAGGED TO DESTRUCTION"

Addressing Obama directly, Adnani added: "O mule of the Jews, you claimed today that America would not be drawn into a war on the ground. No, it will be drawn and dragged ... to its death, grave and destruction."

Obama, who has spent much of his tenure since 2009 extracting the United States from Iraq after its costly 2003 invasion and occupation, is sensitive to charges that he is being drawn into another long campaign that risks the lives of U.S. soldiers.

While Obama has ruled out a combat mission, military officials say the reality of a protracted campaign in Iraq and possibly Syria may ultimately require greater use of U.S. troops, including tactical air strike spotters or front-line advisers embedded with Iraqi forces.

In his statement, Adnani criticised Kurdish fighters who are battling the Islamic State militants in both Syria and Iraq.

"We do not fight Kurds because they are Kurds. Rather we fight the disbelievers amongst them, the allies of the crusaders and Jews in their war against the Muslims," Adnani said.

He added that there were many Muslim Kurds within the ranks of the Islamic State army.

On Monday, Syrian Kurdish fighters halted an advance by Islamic State to the east of a predominantly Kurdish town near the border with Turkey, a spokesman for the main Kurdish group said.

Adnani also condemned Saudi Arabia, whose senior Muslim clergy have denounced Islamic State and whose ruling royal family has joined other Arab states in a pledge to tackle militant ideology as part of a strategy to counter the group.

Adnani condemned Western inaction over Syria's conflict, in which President Bashar al-Assad's forces have been embroiled in civil war with mainly Sunni Muslim fighters since 2011. He said the West had "looked the other way" when barrel bombs were dropped and chemical weapons were used against Muslim civilians.

"So know that – by Allah – we fear not the swarms of planes, nor ballistic missiles, nor drones, nor satellites, nor battleships, nor weapons of mass destruction."