Islamic State 'Beatle' gets life sentence for beheadings
British national Alexanda Kotey, an Islamic State fighter known as one of the 'Beatles' by the hostages he guarded along with other British members of his terror cell, was sentenced to life in prison on Friday at a courtroom in the US state of Virginia.
Kotey and another British man El Shafee Elsheikh were captured in Syria in 2018 and brought to Virginia in 2020 to stand trial in federal court. A third Beatle, Mohammed Emwazi, also known as “Jihadi John,” who carried out the beheadings, was killed in a 2015 drone strike.
Elsheikh will be formally sentenced to life in prison in August, and under the terms of their extradition agreement to the US, neither man faced the death penalty.
Kotey was specifically charged with conspiring in the kidnapping and deaths of four Americans -- journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff and aid workers Kayla Mueller and Peter Kassig.
Foley, Sotloff and Kassig were all beheaded. Mueller was tortured and raped by Islamic State leader Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi before she was killed.
British aid workers Henning and David Haines were also killed by beheading by the Islamic State.
A packed courtroom on Friday heard witness impact statements from about a dozen relatives of the victims.
Lucy Henning talked about her own guilt at the death of her father, Alan Henning, who was tortured and beheaded by the Islamic State a decade ago.
Lucy said she has many questions about her father that remain unanswered: “Did he want to send us a message? Was he mad that we didn’t get him out? Was he buried or cremated? Or was he just left there?”
Kayla Mueller's father, Carl Mueller, said that during the ordeal, “I lost my faith in God, and I lost my faith in our government. My government left her there for 18 months.
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