(AP) Jury selection began Tuesday in the trial of a British national charged with taking a leading role in a scheme by the Islamic State group to take Americans and others as hostages for ransom, resulting in the deaths and beheadings of multiple U.S. citizens.
El Shafee Elsheikh is better known as one of “the Beatles,” a nickname he and three other Brits were given by their captives because of their accents. He is charged in a federal indictment as a leading participant in “a brutal hostage-taking scheme targeting American and European citizens” from 2012 through 2015, when the Islamic State group controlled large swaths of Iraq and Syria and engaged in some of its most disturbing conduct.
He is specifically charged with conspiring in the kidnapping and deaths of four Americans — journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff and aid workers Kayla Mueller and Peter Kassig. Foley, Sotloff and Kassig were all beheaded. Mueller was tortured and raped by Islamic State leader Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi before she was killed.
