Why don’t you go rot in hell
In US courtroom, daughter dramatically confronts Isis ‘Beatle’ who helped kill her Scottish dad, as the terrorist is jailed for life
THE daughter of a Scot killed by an Islamic State terror group known as The Beatles confronted one of them in the dock yesterday after he was given life in a US jail.
Bethany Haines walked up to Alexanda Kotey in the Alexandria, Virginia, court and pointed her finger as she said: ‘Why don’t you go rot in hell.’
Kotey, 37, did not react and walked out of the room where he and El Shafee Elsheikh, another member of gang, had been forced to listen to agonising victim impact statements. A dozen people whose relatives died at their hands told them they were ‘cowards’ and ‘monsters’ in raw, emotional comments.
Kotey, who was born in the UK, admitted eight charges related to kidnapping, torturing and executing hostages in Syria between 2012 and 2015. Elsheikh, 33, was convicted last month and will be sentenced in August. In sentencing Kotey, Judge TS Ellis called his conduct ‘egregious, violent and inhuman’.
He gave him eight life sentences to be served concurrently.
The judge said the victims – all aid workers and journalists – were ‘undeniably heroes’.
The Beatles, who got their name because of their British accents, horrified the world with their propaganda videos where victims were paraded in jumpsuits before being beheaded. Miss Haines, 24, was 17 when her father David, 44, a former RAF worker from Perth, was murdered in 2014 having been captured while doing aid work.
‘Celebrating birthdays or Christmas is not an enjoyable experience for me any more,’ she said.
‘My dad should be celebrating with me, but instead he is in a mass grave in the hills of Raqqa. He hasn’t been laid to rest, he was dumped like a bag of rubbish’.
Miss Haines said that she could not forgive Kotey and Elsheikh because
‘Dumped like a bag of rubbish’
the pair had not ‘expressed one ounce of remorse for their actions’.
She added: ‘These two men are selfish and only care about themselves and until they accept their actions, admit to what they have done, and apologise, then there is no chance they will be forgiven by me. I have no pity for them.’
Miss Haines said that she had ‘struggled wondering why monsters, like these two men, are on this earth but my father isn’t’.
Mr Haines’s brother Michael said David was a ‘force for good’ who had an ‘unrelenting desire’ to help people.
Michael Haines added that he forgave the terrorists so that they would not have ‘power over me’ any more.
The court heard from Dragana Haines, the widow of Mr Haines, who burst into tears as she described getting breast cancer from the stress of his kidnap and killing.
Mrs Haines told the pair: ‘I really hope both of you will live at least 200 years to hear about the death of everyone you care about. For all I care, you can live long and suffer.’
Mr Haines’s youngest daughter Athea told the court she was only four when her father was killed. The 11-year-old sobbed into her mother’s arms as she said: ‘I miss him so much. Sometimes I get sad when I see my friends from school and club laughing and playing with their dads.
‘That is something I will never have a chance to do again. It is not easy to be that kid in school whose dad was killed by terrorists.’
Kotey and Elsheikh were captured in 2018 as the Syrian Defence Forces regained territory from Isis.
Both were stripped of their UK citizenship by the British Government before their extradition to the US.
Another Beatle member, Mohammed Emwazi, was killed in a 2015 drone strike while a fourth, Aine Davis, is serving his sentence in a Turkish prison.