These men must never go free, say families
VICTIMS of the ‘Beatles’ gang yesterday called for them to be locked up for life.
The daughter of British aid worker David Haines, who was murdered in 2014 after 18 months of grim captivity, acknowledged her wish for the jihadis to die ‘a long, slow, painful death’ was unlikely to happen. Instead, she said, they should never be released from jail to set an example for others. The mother of murdered US journalist James Foley similarly wanted the ‘Beatles’ jailed for life, but only after a ‘fair trial’. And surviving hostage Nicolas Henin, a French journalist held by the gang for ten months, said proper trials were vital to stop jihadis claiming the moral high ground.
Bethany Haines, whose former RAF engineer father was just 44 when he was murdered, said: ‘I got a
call late last night to say that they had been captured and the first thought was relief, finally to know that the people that were involved in my dad’s murder have been caught and will sort of serve some justice.’ Asked what she would like to see happen now, the 20-year-old of Scone, Perthshire, said: ‘In my opinion, they shouldn’t be breathing but that’s not really a realistic kind of expectation.
‘They should be locked up with the key thrown away and never to be released.’ She said the gang should be ‘made an example of’ to show ‘there is zero-tolerance for terrorism and these sort of crimes’.
Mr Foley’s mother Diane said: ‘I would like them to spend the rest of their lives being detained in a prison. Their crimes are beyond imagination ... I’d like them to be brought to trial in the US – but as long as they’re brought to fair trial and detained and justice is served I would be most grateful.’ Mr Henin described his torturers as ‘especially violent’, saying: ‘They were doing it for revenge, against all the grievances against the Western world, which were largely fantasies.’
But he added: ‘I’m looking for justice and not revenge ... Revenge is just another call for violence, and a call for another revenge.
‘The worst thing we can do with a terrorist is to deprive him from his rights. Because then you make from a terrorist a victim.’