Members of the Islamic State cell involved in the hostage-taking plot that led to the beheading of a US journalist and aid worker have been sentenced to life in prison by the US federal government. Went to court on Friday.
U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis said at a hearing in federal court in Alexandria, Virginia, in a ruling that the victim's family and friends offered "a little bit of justice," 33-year-old Elle said. Shafi He sentenced El Sheikh.
Four months ago, a jury convicted a former British citizen on charges including conspiracy to commit a fatal hostage-taking and murder. He was found guilty in April.
After his six-week trial and hours of deliberation in April, jurors said Elsheikh had beheaded American hostages in Iraq and Syria, dubbed "The Beatles" because of his English accent. It concluded that he was part of the Islamic State organization.
"This defendant's conduct is horrifying, barbaric, brutal and, of course, nothing more than criminal," Ellis said.
Elsheikh, who was born in Sudan and raised in London, was accused of conspiring to murder four American hostages: James Foley, Stephen Sotloff, Peter Kassig and Kayla Mueller.
Journalists Foley and Sotloff and aid worker Kassig were killed by videotaped decapitation. Mueller was raped. Baghdadi repeated before she died in Syria, US officials said.
Foley, Sotloff and Kassig confirmed dead in 2014; rice field. Early 2015.
Speaking to reporters following the verdict, Foley's mother, Diane, said: US justice will find you wherever you are and our government will hold you accountable. The indictment against Elsheikh, who was stripped of his British citizenship in 2018, included a possible death sentence, but US prosecutors have previously informed British officials that they will not seek the death penalty. rice field.
Prosecutors argued that life imprisonment was necessary to prevent Elsheikh from committing future harm and to set a precedent for such crimes to be severely punished.
Another cell member, Alexander Cotey, was sentenced to life in prison by a US judge earlier this year. Coty was detained in Iraq by US forces before being airlifted to the US to face her trial. He pleaded guilty to the murders of Foley, Sotloff, Kassig and Mueller last September.
His third member of the group, Mohammed Emwazi, was killed in a US-UK missile attack in Syria in 2015.
After lengthy negotiations, some of the former hostages released from their cells testified during the trial about the torture they were subjected to. Family members of the murdered also testified.
At the peak of its power between 2014 and 2017, IS controlled millions of people and claimed responsibility for or attacked in dozens of cities around the world.
Its leader al-Baghdadi proclaimed a caliphate covering a quarter of Iraq and Syria in 2014, before the group's rule collapsed in 2019. Killed in a raid by US Special Forces in Syria.
