Seven years after the Islamic State horrified people around the world by beheading hostages and using their deaths in gruesome propaganda videos, one former member has admitted to his involvement in the killings of four Americans.
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Alexanda A. Kotey, 37, pleaded guilty Thursday in federal court in Alexandria to playing a role in the kidnappings and deaths of journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff and aid workers Peter Kassig and Kayla Mueller. The three men were beheaded on camera in videos posted online; The circumstances of Mueller’s death remain unclear.
All four traveled to Syria, their friends and family have said, out of an intense desire to help — either by reporting on the war there or giving aid to those displaced by the conflict.
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Kotey’s plea marks the first time a member of the Islamic State has been held accountable in a U.S. court for those killings. He faces a mandatory life sentence.
The parents of the slain victims had pressed for criminal trials in the United States for suspects arrested overseas. All but one of the parents and three siblings were present in the front rows of the courtroom Thursday.
“The U.S. government should send a more powerful message: It doesn’t matter who you are or where you are. If you harm American citizens, you will not escape. You will be hunted down,” Diane and John Foley, Paula and Ed Kassig, Marsha and Carl Mueller and Shirley and Art Sotloff wrote in a July 2020 opinion piece in The Washington Post.
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Kotey is also implicated by prosecutors in the deaths of two British aid workers and two Japanese men. He was captured in Syria in 2018 along with El Shafee Elsheikh, another accused Islamic State militant who is awaiting trial in the case, and brought to the United States in October.
Along with the masked killer from the videos, Mohammed Emwazi, who was killed in a drone strike in 2015, and a fourth Londoner, Aine Davis, they became known by hostages as “The Beatles” because of their British accents.
Kotey, of Ghanaian and Greek Cypriot descent, was born and raised in London and began practicing Islam in his early 20s after having a child. He and Emwazi attended the same mosque, and according to prosecutors traveled to Syria together in 2012.
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The United Kingdom revoked the pair’s citizenship because of their alleged affiliation with the Islamic State and at the time declined to pursue charges against them. But a court challenge from Elsheikh’s mother kept the British government from sharing key evidence with American authorities without assurance that the two men would not face the death penalty in a U.S. prosecution.
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Under pressure from both the Pentagon and the victims’ families, who did not want the men transferred to Guantánamo Bay, the Trump administration agreed in late 2020 to not seek capital punishment in the cases.
In interviews given to reporters while they were held in Kurdish custody in 2019, Kotey and Elsheikh admitted asking hostages questions but claimed that they were powerless to control Emwazi, who had risen above them in the Islamic State hierarchy.
“I’m sorry of course that that was their fate,” Kotey told The Washington Post in 2019, when asked what he would say to the families of the people who were killed. “At the same time it wasn’t something that I had any say or any ability to do anything about.”
Prosecutors have alleged that both Kotey and Elsheikh were involved in the Islamic State’s attempts to extract ransom from prisoners’ families through calculated brutality. Kotey instructed hostages to kneel and watch a Syrian prisoner’s execution while holding signs begging for their release, prosecutors said.
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Under President Barack Obama, the military tried and failed to rescue the four American hostages; surviving relatives have rebuked him for not doing more to secure their release.
Foley, 40, a freelance journalist from Illinois working for the Boston-based GlobalPost, was abducted along with a British translator in November 2012. GlobalPost said it worked desperately to rescue Foley, but video of his death was released in August 2014.
Sotloff, 31, was also a freelance journalist, raised in Florida, who was abducted near Aleppo in August 2013. Video of his death was released in September 2014. In both cases, the journalists’ families received emails allegedly written by Kotey and Elsheikh demanding either money or the release of Muslim prisoners. The indictment states that Kotey and Elsheikh were also involved in transporting the prisoners between detention sites.
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Mueller, 26, was a humanitarian aid worker from Arizona who had worked with agencies such as Doctors Without Borders when she was kidnapped in August 2013. Despite American military efforts to rescue her, her family received an email with photos confirming her death in February 2015.
Kassig, 26, was a former Army Ranger from Indiana who founded a humanitarian aid group for refugees, and was on his way to deliver food and medical supplies to refugees when he was abducted in October 2013. Video of his death was released by the Islamic State in November 2014.
The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria reached its peak in 2015, and as the group’s territory shrunk, the campaign of public beheadings ended. But adherents of the group’s violent ideology continue to rely on such brutal methods; in recent months, observers say Islamist militants have decapitated dozens of civilians in Mozambique.
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Elsheikh is set to go to trial in January. Davis was imprisoned in Turkey in 2017 for his involvement.
Kotey pleaded guilty to hostage-taking resulting in the deaths of four Americans and conspiring to support the terrorists who killed American, British and Japanese hostages.
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