by Jan Wolfe
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The trial of one of the alleged members of the “Beatles”, a group of jihadists of the Islamic State organization thus nicknamed because of their British accent, accused of having participated in the beheading of American hostages, opens Tuesday in the United States.
El Shafee Elsheikh, 33, is scheduled to appear in federal court in Alexandria, Virginia, near Washington, to answer charges including hostage taking resulting in death and conspiracy to commit murder.
The “Beatles” became infamous for airing the beheading videos of four US nationals, journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff and aid workers Kayla Mueller and Peter Kassig.
They were also the jailers of four French hostages – journalists Nicolas Hénin, Pierre Torres, Didier François and Edouard Elias – between June 2013 and April 2014 in Aleppo, at a time when the Islamic State group was extending its hold on northern Syria.
Two of the four alleged members of the group, El Shafee Elsheikh and Alexanda Kotey, were captured by the US military and detained in Iraq after the fall of IS, before being transferred to the United States for trial.
The group’s alleged leader, Briton Mohammed Emwazi, who oversaw the hostage executions, was killed in a drone strike in 2015. The fourth ‘Beatles’, Aine Lesley Davis, was arrested in Turkey where he was sentenced for terrorism.
Alexanda Kotey, who was stripped of her nationality by the British government, pleaded guilty in September 2021 to the murders of the four American hostages. His sentence will be handed down next month.
The charges against Elsheikh carry the death penalty, but US federal prosecutors have told British authorities that it will not be required against their national, nor against Kotey.
Elsheikh’s lawyers, for their part, seek to minimize the role of their client by arguing that the beheadings were organized and perpetrated by Mohammed Emwazi alone on the direct order of the IS leadership.
(Report by Jan Wolfe, French version Tangi Salaün, edited by Jean-Michel Bélot)
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