WASHINGTON – Two of the British ISIS terrorists called the “Beatles” incriminated themselves further by mistreating Western hostages in Syria, including the American Kayla Mueller, in interviews obtained exclusively by NBC News.
In interviews, the two men, Alexanda Kotey and El Shafee Elsheikh, first admitted their involvement in the captivity of Mueller, a humanitarian worker who was held captive and tortured and sexually abused before his death in 2015.
Kotey said, “I was alone in a room where no one would enter.”
Elsheikh went into more detail and said, “I took an email from her myself,” meaning that she obtained an email address that ISIS could use to demand the family’s ransom. “I was in a big room, it was dark, and I was alone, and … I was very scared.”
In an email reviewed by NBC News, ISIS demanded that the Muellers pay 5 million euros and threatened that if the demands were not met, they would send the family “a photo of Kayla’s body.”
Kotey and Elsheikh are in US military custody in Iraq amid questions about how and when they will face justice. US and British authorities say the so-called “Beatles” were responsible for 27 murders, including the beheadings of Americans James Foley, Steven Sotloff and Peter Kassig, and British workers David Haines and Alan Henning.
The families of the American hostages killed by ISIS tell NBC News that they are urging the Trump administration to try them in a US civil court.
“They did a lot of horror to so many people,” said Marsha Mueller, Kayla’s mother. “They need to be brought here. They need to be processed. The other thing that is really important to me about this is that I need information about Kayla. We know very little about what happened to her.”
He added: “I think these two have more information than they share with us. And I think we would get more information if they were brought here.”
“They are admitting they were there,” said Kayla’s father Carl Mueller. “And of course they are not going to tell the dark side of the story.”
American families published an opinion piece in the Washington Post on Thursday imploring the Justice Department to bring the two men to the United States for prosecution.
In captivity, Kayla was taken to live with a senior ISIS official and was raped by former ISIS leader Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, US officials said. Baghdadi committed suicide in a suicide vest while US commandos were chasing him last fall during a raid in northwest Syria.
Kayla is believed to have died in 2015 in what ISIS said was a Jordanian airstrike. How she was killed has never been confirmed.
In a 2018 interview with the BBC, Kotey and Elsheikh denied ever meeting Mueller.
“WHO?” Elsheikh replied when asked if he had ever met Mueller.
“We did not meet any non-Muslim foreigners,” added Kotey.
In the new interviews, both Kotey and Elsheikh sought to distance themselves from the torture and killings attributed to them as prison guards, calling themselves “liaisons” with the hostages. But each admitted to beating the captives and playing a role in facilitating communication with their families in an effort to obtain ransoms.
“I never denied that they were ever beaten,” Kotey said of the hostages. As an example, she talked about hitting a Dutch captive in the chest to make a mark that would be visible on a photo that would be sent to her family.
Elsheikh and Kotey were captured in Syria in 2018 by the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces.
The Kurds turned them over to the U.S. military, and President Donald Trump was considering a plan to send Kotey and Elsheikh to the U.S. military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, reported NBC News.
US officials tell NBC News that the United States is determined to arrange for the two men to face the charges in a US court and that efforts to bring them from Iraq continue.
That effort suffered a setback in March, when Britain’s Supreme Court ruled that the United Kingdom could not share evidence with US prosecutors while the couple was in danger of the death penalty.
A criminal court is the best place to get to the truth, said Chuck Rosenberg, a former federal prosecutor and legal analyst at NBC News.
“We have had great success in the federal courts of the United States in terrorism cases,” he said. “That is absolutely where they belong. Not in Guantanamo Bay, not before military courts, but in the federal courts of the United States.”
The four beatles
The former hostages who managed to get out of ISIS detention say that all four members of the “Beatles”, given that nickname due to their British accents, were cruel and sadistic captors. Mohammed Emmwazi, the black-clad terrorist known as Jihadi John who decapitated many of the hostages in front of the camera, was vaporized by Hellfire missiles from a CIA drone in 2015. The fourth Beatle, Aine Lesley Davis, was sentenced to Seven and a half years in prison in Turkey in 2017.
According to a State Department narrative that designates him as a terrorist, “Elsheikh was said to have earned a reputation for the submarine, simulated executions and crucifixions while serving as an ISIS jailer.”
The State Department said Kotey, as a prison guard, “probably participated in the group’s executions and in exceptionally cruel methods of torture, including electronic shocks and submarines.”
The two men denied that in the new interviews.
“Everyone talks about the rights of these two Beatles,” Art and Shirley Sotloff said in a statement to NBC News. “What about the rights of our children, Steven and Jim and Peter and Kayla? Do they not have the right to justice?”
