Isis Beatle pleads guilty in court to helping kidnap behead and murder American hostages

A British member of an Isis cell that was nicknamed “the Beatles” and was notorious for its brutal kidnapping and beheading of hostages, has pleaded guilty in an American court.

Alexanda Kotey, 37, pleaded guilty to federal charges of hostage-taking resulting in death, conspiracy to commit murder against US citizens abroad and conspiracy to provide material support to terrorists.

Reports said that family members of many of the victims killed by the cell of British jihaidis, named the Beatles because of their accents, were in court to watch the proceedings in Alexandria, Virginia.

“Alexanda Kotey, an avowed member of Isis, pleaded guilty today to all charges that were brought against him in the United States for his participation in a horrific hostage-taking scheme that resulted in the deaths of four US citizens, as well as the deaths of British and Japanese nationals, in Syria,” Acting United States Attorney and one of the lead prosecutors on the case, Raj Parekh, said in a statement. “He has agreed to spend the rest of his life in prison.”

Mr Parekh added: “The four American victims in this caseâ€"James Wright Foley, Kayla Jean Mueller, Steven Joel Sotloff, and Peter Edward Kassigâ€"were journalists and humanitarian aid workers, pillars of courage and kindness on the front lines of a perilous conflict.

“They risked their lives to shine a light on the darkest corners of the globe and to help others most in need. The values that they personified to the very end are the antithesis of those embodied by the terrorist organisation that murdered them.”

Kotey and fellow alleged “Beatle” El Shafee Elsheikh initially pleaded not guilty at a hearing last October. But in a move that indicated the British-born extremist had done a plea deal with prosecutors, he pled guilty to each of the charges leveled at him.

The New York Times reported that as family members of four of the cell’s victims sat in the federal court, that has been frequently used to try terror and espionage cases, Kotey spoke without apparent emotion as he detailed his crimes.

He said he had always known that the hostages would be killed if the US government did not meet their ransom demands, which he emailed to their families. If they did not meet those demands, it would “ultimately result in either indefinite detention of those foreign captives or their execution”.

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