British-born pair charged in US over murder of Isis hostages
Two British-born citizens alleged to have members of an Isis execution squad infamous for beheading hostages have been flown to the US to face trial after two years in detention.
El Shafee Elsheikh and Alexanda Kotey, believed to have been part of a four-man squad known by their captives as “the Beatles” because of their British accents, arrived in the US on Wednesday morning and appeared in federal court in Alexandria, northern Virginia, where they were informed of the charges against them – eight counts of conspiracy to commit murder, hostage taking resulting in death and material support to a terrorist group.
They were remanded into the custody of the US Marshals and pending their next hearing on Friday.
“The case we are announcing today highlights when we have the evidence to do so, we will take responsibility for prosecuting those non-US citizens who have injured or killed Americans anywhere in the world,” assistant attorney general John Demers said. “If you have American blood in your veins, or you have American blood on your hands, you will face American justice.”
The indictment describes how Isis victims were beheaded as another hostage was forced to watch and then kneel before the executioner as they were told they would be next. The hostages were subjected to mock executions, forced to fight one another, beaten and electrocuted with Tasers and placed in chokeholds until they passed out. Huge ransoms and the release of jihadist prisoners were demanded for the hostages’ release, but in most cases they were simply executed, and their executions filmed.
The two defendantswere stripped of their UK citizenship but their extradition to the US was held up by a British court until the US attorney general, William Barr, agreed not to pursue death penalties. Following Barr’s announcement, the UK handed over evidence on the two men to US prosecutors in September.
Demers said the UK evidence would play an important role in the prosecution.
“We decided that if we were going to do this case, we were going to tell the fullest story we could, of what these defendants did, and we were going to put on the strongest case possible,” he said. “And with the British evidence I think we can do that very well.”
The group’s victims included the British aid workers David Haines and Alan Henning, the US journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff, and the US aid workers Peter Kassig and Kayla Mueller, who was also tortured and raped.
In all, US prosecutors say the squad beheaded more than 27 hostages.
The former Isis leader Abu Bakr alBaghdadi, killed by US forces in October 2019, is named as a co-conspirator in the indictment, as is Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, the head of the Isis propaganda operation killed in a 2016 airstrike, with whom the defendants are alleged to have met to discuss the hostage-taking scheme.
Speaking on behalf of families of the US victims, the James Foley Legacy Foundation said: “James, Peter, Kayla and Steven were kidnapped, tortured, beaten, starved, and murdered by members of the Islamic State in Syria. Now our families can pursue accountability for these crimes against our children in a US court.”
Mike Haines, the brother of David Haines, a humanitarian worker from Perth in Scotland, said: “The pain we experienced as families was excruciating when we lost our loved ones, and the last three years have been a long, horrible waiting game.”
“I, like the other families, am relieved that the fate of these two men is closer to being decided but this is just the beginning,” Haines told the Press Association. “It was a big win for us knowing that the US courts would be taking this forward because we have been waiting years since they were first detained.”
The trial of the two men comes two years after their capture by Kurdish forces in Syria. They were handed to the US military in October 2019 and have since then been held at a US airbase in Iraq pending the legal contest over their fate.
The group’s ringleader, Mohammed Emwazi, known as “Jihadi John” was killed in a US airstrike in November 2015. The fourth member of the group, Aine Davis, was sentenced to seven years in prison in Turkey three years ago. He is referred to in the US indictment as “co-conspirator 1”.
“Throughout the captivity of the American hostages and others, Kotey, Elsheikh, and Emwazi allegedly supervised detention facilities holding hostages and were responsible for transferring hostages between detention facilities, in addition to engaging in a prolonged pattern of physical and psychological violence against hostages,” a justice department statement said.
The justice department said it would stick to Barr’s pledge to the UK government not to pursue capital punishment.
“The decision at first of the department was to leave open the possibility to seek the death penalty. There’s a whole process for doing that, and obviously that’s a process that we never undertook, because the attorney general decided that we should provide the death penalty assurance, in order to get the British evidence and see that justice could be done more expeditiously,” Demers said.