USA

“You are going to go through an ordeal,” a lawyer for British Islamic State Beatle El Shafee Elsheikh warned the jury at the start of his terrorism trial in Virginia last month.

What followed was a fortnight of some of the most harrowing testimony imaginable.

The 12 jurors at the Alexandria federal court were made to listen to audio recordings of the so-called Beatles’ victims pleading for their lives. They watched their subsequent execution videos, and looked at photographs of decapitated heads triumphantly displayed on spikes.

Update: El Shafee Elsheikh: Guilty verdict for Islamic State ‘Beatle’ jihadist

A US federal jury in Virginia has convicted an ex-British jihadist over his involvement with a notorious Islamic State terror cell.

El Shafee Elsheikh, 33, was linked to the abduction, torture and beheading of several IS hostages in Syria, including journalists and aid workers.

On Thursday, after a three-week trial, he was found guilty of lethal hostage taking and conspiracy to commit murder.

ALEXANDRIA, Va. — Federal prosecutors concluded their conspiracy and terrorism case against a British member of the Islamic State on Wednesday with a wrenching account of how an aid worker had been brutalized and sexually assaulted during a year and a half in captivity.

For much of her ordeal, the aid worker, Kayla Mueller, 24, was held by a notorious cell of four Islamic State members known for their viciousness and nicknamed “the Beatles” for their British accents, muffled behind black balaclavas.

Prosecutors say the defendant, El Shafee Elsheikh, 33, is “Ringo.” For nearly two weeks, they have argued that the polite, bespectacled defendant was a central figure in the Beatles, responsible for drafting ransom emails and mistreating prisoners. Among those captives, they say, were Ms. Mueller and three American men — James Foley, Steven J. Sotloff, and Peter Kassig — who were later beheaded by one of Mr. Elsheikh’s close associates.

Isn’t “death for the sake of Allah the highest calling” anymore?

An odd story appeared in the Boston Globe on Thursday: it seems that “Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is asking the First Circuit Court of Appeals to stay his execution and consider four constitutional claims in his case that were not presented to the US Supreme Court, which last month reinstated the death penalty for Tsarnaev, ruling that he had received a fair trial for his role in the 2013 terrorist attacks that killed three and injured more than 260.” But doesn’t Tsarnaev believe anymore that “death for the sake of Allah is the highest calling”? Doesn’t he want to enjoy the virgins of paradise? Could it even be that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, after committing murder for Allah, has left Islam?

Syria’s civil war was raging in March 2013 when black vehicles cut off an Italian aid worker’s car in the north of the country. Masked gunmen forced Federico Motka and a colleague into the trunk of a car and sped off.

“Welcome to Syria, you mutt,” Motka recalled one of the captors ominously telling the aid workers in British-accented English, before they were driven to a camp of Islamist militants who were battling the Syrian regime.

This was the beginning of 14 months of torment for Motka and other foreigners held by a group that would soon be known worldwide as the Islamic State. In Alexandria federal court, Motka testified that he grew to fear the British-accented man and two others from England the most. Captives dubbed them “the Beatles.”

Go incognito

Abdullah Faaruuq is the imam of Mosque Praise Allah in Boston, and while one would think that a man who has dedicated his life to spiritual pursuits and has a congregation to which he can minister would be at peace and content with his existence, Abdullah Faaruuq is not a happy man. He lives in the United States of America, you see, and while millions of his coreligionists would happily cross our porous Southern border and throw themselves upon the tender mercies of Old Joe Biden’s handlers in order to get here, and many are actually doing so, Abdullah Faaruuq is not pleased to be in what was once known as the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave. He would rather be any number of other places, where Allah’s sun shines on those who conform their behavior to his immutable and ineffable will.

After being tortured, starved and dragged through the blood of fellow prisoners, a French war photographer kidnapped by ISIS in Syria back in 2013 said he and other hostages attempted to kill themselves.

‘We found plastic bags and ropes,’ Edouard Elias tested Friday during a federal trial against one of his captors, El Shafee Elsheikh, a former British national who was sitting just a feet away in an Alexandria, Virginia courtroom. ‘We tried to find a way of suicide.’

Elsheikh is accused of leading a kidnapping plot that resulted in the killings of US aid workers Kayla Mueller and Peter Kassig and journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff.