(Alexandria) American justice began on Wednesday the trial of an Islamic State (IS) jihadist accused of having been part of a “terrifying” cell specializing in the capture and execution of Western hostages.
Updated yesterday at 8:09 p.m.
From the opening of the proceedings, the lawyer for El Shafee el-Sheikh, a 33-year-old man stripped of his British nationality, however assured that his client had “not been part of the Beatles”.
This nickname was given by Western hostages to a group of jailers with a British accent, who had gained notoriety in 2014 by staging the execution of captives in excruciating propaganda videos.
They are suspected of having, between 2012 and 2015, kidnapped 27 Western hostages, from fifteen countries. “All were abused, brutalized at the hands of the ‘Beatles’,” said prosecutor John Gibbs. They were “absolutely terrifying”.
“Secretly, the hostages had given them nicknames and El Shafee el-Sheikh was Ringo,” assured the prosecutor.
Among the hostages were four Americans: journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff, as well as aid workers Kayla Mueller and Peter Kassig.
“Despicable”
The three men were beheaded in front of cameras, like other British and Japanese hostages.
Young Kayla Mueller was reduced to “slavery” and “raped” by IS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, before dying in 2015 in unclear circumstances.
These are “despicable, senseless acts, we do not dispute it”, commented the defendant’s lawyer, Ed MacMahon.
But the jailers were still masked and had “the same characteristics, the same background, the same accent”, he noted, questioning the credibility of their identification by the released hostages.
For meand MacMahon, El Shafee el-Sheikh did travel to Syria in 2012 and join ISIS, but “he was not a member of the ‘Beatles'”.
He “was not involved in the kidnappings or the murders,” he argued, asking the jurors to acquit him.
In an exchange with AFP, James Foley’s mother, Diane, said she was “surprised” by this line of defense, but relied on the “solid” prosecution case to obtain justice.
“Time Factor”
A former Danish soldier then took the witness stand to tell how he had negotiated for months to obtain the release of a Danish photographer, Daniel Rye Ottosen.
He read chillingly cynical emails addressed to the young man’s family, demanding increasingly high ransoms.
“You are negotiating the life of your only son and time is a factor”, they notably wrote to the parents, accompanying their remarks with photos or videos of executed hostages.
In total, around forty witnesses should be called to testify during the three to four weeks of the trial.
Among them will be former hostages and a Yazidi woman, a former IS slave, who was held for several months with Kayla Mueller.
“Without Compassion”
El Shafee el-Sheikh was arrested by Syrian Kurdish forces in 2018 along with fellow alleged Beatles member Alexanda Kotey.
While he was their captive, he admitted, in interviews granted to several media, to having “interacted” without “compassion” with the hostages.
But he has sought to downplay his role, portraying himself as a go-between collecting the email addresses of detainees’ relatives to negotiate ransoms.
The two men had been transferred in 2019 to American forces in Iraq and in 2020 to the United States.
Alexanda Kotey has since pleaded guilty in the hope of serving part of her sentence – which will be handed down at the end of April – in the UK.
The most prominent figure of the “Beatles”, Mohammed Emwazi, known as “Jihadi John”, who appeared armed with a butcher’s knife on the films showing the execution of the hostages, died in an attack by American drone in 2015.
A fourth British jihadist, Aine Davis, is in prison in Turkey, where he was convicted of terrorism.
El Shafee el-Sheikh faces an irreducible life prison sentence, the United States having agreed not to seek the death penalty in order to obtain judicial cooperation from London.