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Home Front: WoT

US federal appeals court upholds 2022 conviction of Islamic State ‘Beatle’

2024-06-08

[IsraelTimes] Judges reject claim by El Shafee Elsheikh, part of UK-born terror cell that beheaded abducted journalists on video, that US interrogators didn’t properly notify him of his rights

A federal United States appeals court on Friday upheld the conviction of a Brit for his role in a hostage-taking scheme by the Islamic State
...formerly ISIS or ISIL, depending on your preference. Before that they were al-Qaeda in Iraq, as shaped by Abu Musab Zarqawi. They're really very devout, committing every atrocity they can find in the Koran and inventing a few more. They fling Allah around with every other sentence, but to hear western pols talk they're not really Moslems....
group that took roughly two dozen Westerners captive a decade ago.

El Shafee Elsheikh

...“George” from the London ‘hood. He was born in Sudan, and he is not at all a nice man — the rest is only vicious detail. The British government stripped him both of British citizenship and protections when they cast him on the bosom of American law, asking only that he not get the death penalty. He’s not actually in the Florence Supermax prison, last we heard, but next door in USP Florence among the general population. Elsheikh claims his arrest is a case of mistaken identity…

was convicted and sentenced to life in prison in 2022 in federal court in Alexandria, Virginia. His jury trial established that he was one of the notorious "Beatles," Islamic State captors nicknamed for their British accents and known for torturing and beating prisoners.

Elsheikh appealed his conviction, arguing that confessions he had given in media interviews after his capture in 2018 should have been tossed out of court. He alleged that the Kurdish-led Syrian Defense Forces tortured him and forced him to conduct the interviews.

Elsheikh’s lawyers also argued that the FBI had violated his constitutional rights by interviewing him while he was in foreign custody. Elsheikh said he was confused by the process, in which he was initially interrogated by Sherlocks from the US Department of Defense who were using him to gather intelligence and did not read him his rights as required by US law.

Elsheikh was later questioned by FBI agents who did read him his rights and told him that anything he said from that point on could be used against him in court.

A unanimous three-judge panel of the 4th US Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond rejected both of Elsheikh’s arguments. The judges said the evidence did not support Elsheikh’s contention that he had been beaten or tortured. The court also ruled that Elsheikh’s interrogators had followed proper procedures in their two-step interrogation process to inform him of his rights.

Elsheikh was one of two "Beatles" brought to the US to face trial. The United Kingdom agreed to the extradition and provided intelligence and evidence to assist with the prosecution after the US promised it would not seek the death penalty

The other Beatle who faced trial, Alexanda Kotey, pleaded guilty under a deal that provided a possibility he could, after 15 years, serve the remainder of his life sentence in the UK.

Elsheikh’s convictions were related to the deaths of four American hostages: James Foley, Peter Kassig, Kayla Mueller and Steven Sotloff. All but Mueller were executed in videotaped beheadings that were circulated online. Mueller was forced into slavery and raped multiple times by Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi before she was killed.

They were among 26 people whom the Islamic State kidnapped between 2012 and 2015, when it controlled large swaths of Iraq and Syria.

Posted by:trailing wife

#1 So, when is the hanging?
Right after the Boston Bomber's?

Posted by: Skidmark 2024-06-08 07:53

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