US court sentences former British national and Daesh member to life in prison
A US federal judge has sentenced a former British citizen and member of the Daesh terrorist group to eight concurrent life sentences.
District Court Judge T.S. Ellis found El Shafee Elsheikh, 34, guilty of four counts of hostage-taking and four counts of conspiracy and sentenced him to life without parole at the end of a two-week trial on Friday.
Elsheikh was accused of conspiring to kill four American hostages, namely James Foley, Steven Sotloff, Peter Kassig, and Kayla Mueller. Foley and Sotloff, who were journalists, and Kassig, who was an aid worker, were killed in videotaped beheadings, and their deaths were confirmed in 2014. Mueller’s death was confirmed in early 2015.
Elsheikh, who held British citizenship until 2018, was a member of a notorious Daesh cell known as “The Beatles” — named that way for their British accents.
The charges against Elsheikh carried a potential death sentence, but US prosecutors had previously informed British officials that they would not seek the death penalty.
Another member of “The Beatles,” Alexanda Kotey, was sentenced to life in prison by a US judge earlier this year. He had pleaded guilty last September to the murders of Foley, Sotloff, Kassig, and Mueller.
When Daesh overtook territory in Iraq and Syria in 2014, thousands of recruits from Western countries, including many from Europe, were able to freely travel to the areas then under the group’s control. Law enforcement agencies in those countries took no action to stop their citizens from joining the terrorist group, which at the time was involved in unspeakable terror against the local governments and populations of Syria and Iraq and threatened to attack other countries.
Several countries, including Syria and Iraq themselves, warned repeatedly at the time that the Western government’s duplicitous policy of allowing homegrown terrorists into the Middle East would backfire.
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