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US to announce charges against alleged Isis 'Beatles' members British-born pair charged in US over murder of Isis hostages
(about 5 hours later)
British pair, El Shafee Elsheikh and Alexanda Kotey, to appear in Virginia federal court El Shafee Elsheikh and Alexanda Kotey, held in detention for two years, transferred to America and charged with terrorism offences
The US Department of Justice is preparing to announce charges against two men from Britain who allegedly joined Islamic State and were part of a cell that beheaded western hostages, a law enforcement official has said. 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 be two of four men known as “the Beatles” by the people they held captive because of their British accents. 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 are due to make a first court appearance in Alexandria, northern Virginia, in the afternoon.
They were expected to make their first appearance on Wednesday afternoon in a federal court in Alexandria, Virginia, said the official, who was not authorised to discuss the case publicly before an official announcement. They were charged with eight counts of conspiracy to commit murder, hostage taking resulting in death and material support to a terrorist group.
The expected charges are a milestone in a years-long effort by US authorities to bring to justice members of the group known for beheadings and barbaric treatment of American aid workers, journalists and other hostages in Syria. “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 men’s arrival in the US sets the stage for arguably the most sensational terrorism trial since the 2014 criminal case against the suspected ringleader of a deadly attack on the diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya. 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.
Videos of the killings, released online by Isis, stunned the US government for their unflinching violence. The two defendants were 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.
The recordings routinely showed prisoners in orange jumpsuits on their knees beside a captor dressed in black, whose native English underlined the global reach of a group that at its peak occupied vast swaths of Syria and Iraq. Demers said the UK evidence would play an important role in the prosecution.
Elsheikh and Kotey have been held in US military custody since October 2019, after being captured in Syria one year earlier by the US-based Syrian Democratic Forces. “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 justice department has long wanted to put them on trial, but those efforts were complicated by wrangling over whether Britain, which does not have capital punishment, would share evidence that could be used in a death penalty prosecution. 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.
The US attorney general, William Barr, broke the diplomatic standoff this year when he promised the men would not face the death penalty. That prompted British authorities to share evidence that US prosecutors deemed crucial for obtaining convictions. In all, US prosecutors say the squad beheaded more than 27 hostages.
In interviews while in detention, the two men said they helped collect email addresses from Kayla Mueller, an American human rights activist, that could be used to send ransom demands. Mueller was killed in 2015 after 18 months in Isis captivity. The former Isis leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, 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 met to discuss the hostage-taking scheme.
The state department declared Elsheikh and Kotey as specially designated global terrorists in 2017 and accused them of holding captive and beheading approximately two dozen hostages, including the American journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff, and the aid worker Peter Kassig. 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.”
Specifically, the department said Elsheikh “was said to have earned a reputation for waterboarding, mock executions and crucifixions while serving as an Isis jailer”. 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.”
Kotey, according to the department, allegedly acted as an Isis recruiter and “likely engaged in the group’s executions and exceptionally cruel torture methods, including electronic shock and waterboarding”. “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 other two “Beatles” included the most infamous member, Mohammed Emwazi, known as Jihadi John, who was killed in a 2015 drone strike. Emwazi appeared and spoke in the video of Foley’s execution. The fourth member, Aine Lesley Davis, was sentenced to seven years in prison in Turkey in 2017. 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 air base 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 Beatles, 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.