{UAH} Britain's ISIS 'Beatles' should be tried in the West, families say
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LONDON — Families of some victims of the "Beatles," four suspected members of a British Islamic State cell, said Friday that two militants of the group captured in January should face justice in the West.
"The best thing for them is to be locked up and for the key to be thrown away," Bethany Haines, whose father David, a Scottish aid worker, was beheaded by the men in 2014, told the BBC. "If it goes to trial, I will certainly be there. I will look them in the eye and let them know that I am who I am, and that they destroyed a big part of my life," she said.
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The U.S. State Department believes Alexanda Kotey, El Shafee Elsheikh, Mohammed Emwazi and Aine Davis were involved in the deaths of nearly 30 Western hostages, including the American journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff, who were also beheaded. The terrorists imprisoned, tortured and murdered the hostages in Iraq and Syria.
The four men, all from London, were nicknamed by their captives after Paul, Ringo, John and George of the Beatles because of their British accents.
Kotey and Elsheikh were apprehended by U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces on the battlefields of Syria last month, according to a report first published Thursday in The New York Times. Emwazi, known as "Jihadi John" because he wore a mask to conceal his identity while appearing in Islamic State propaganda videos, was killed in a drone strike near Raqqa, Syria, in 2015. Davis is in jail in Turkey on terrorism charges.
"Their crimes are beyond imagination," Diane Foley, James' mother, told the BBC. She said she would ideally like to see Kotey and Elsheikh face trial in the United States, but would be "most grateful" if they got a "fair trial" and "justice is served."
It was not immediately clear if Kotey and Elsheikh are still being held by the Syrian Democratic Forces, an alliance of Kurdish and Arab fighters who are battling Islamic State militants as well as the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad.
Nicolas Henin, a French journalist who was captured and held by the Islamic State in Syria for 10 months before being released, told NBC News Friday that he wouldn't "be at ease as long as European jihadists are detained in prisons" in the Middle East, where legal standards "are not those of the Western world" and where there are opportunities to escape "by force or through corruption."
Henin said he favored a trial in the West for "moral, legal and security reasons."
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