The British government has halted co-operation with the U.S. over the ‘ISIS Beatles’, who may face the death penalty for their alleged role as jihadist executioners.
Senior Tories and left-liberals were outraged that Home Secretary Sajid Javid was helping the U.S. authorities build a case against the alleged Islamic State murderers, without first demanding assurances they would not face the death penalty.
Despite public support for capital punishment in Britain, the political class has long enforced a policy of refusing to extradite alleged criminals to countries which have retained it unless they agree to take execution off the table — a policy which has made it impossible for the country to deport a number of dangerous foreigners over the years.
The case of Alexanda Kotey, an Islamic convert from London, and Shafee El-Sheikh, who came to Britain as a refugee, is slightly different, as they are not actually on British soil or in British custody, and have been stripped of their British citzenship, and Javid was only providing the U.S. with information about their activities in the Middle East.
But that co-operation has now ground to a halt, as the mother of one of the two men — allegedly members of the so-called ‘Beatles’ group of ‘British’ jihadists said to have tortured and murdered a number of captives, including British and American aid workers and journalists — has applied to the High Court to overrule the Home Secretary’s decision.
Lawyer’s for El-Sheikh’s mother said the Home Office had embarked on “a clear and dramatic departure from the UK’s long-standing international and domestic commitment to oppose the continuing exercise of the death penalty”.
A Home Office spokesman said the Government had “agreed to a short-term pause” while the case unfurled, but said it was confident it had “acted in full accordance of the law”.
The championing of the two alleged mass murderers by establishment politicians and media elites has drawn sharp criticism from some commentators who feel it shows their priorities are wrong, including opponents of the death penalty such as journalist Brendan O’Neill.
“The fury over the possibility that these two men will be executed has been intense. Unusually intense. More intense, it feels, than the fury that greeted the ISIS Beatles’ severing of Alan Henning’s neck,” O’Neill wrote, referring to the beheading of a British aid worker, allegedly by the so-called ‘Beatles’, which Islamic State broadcast online.
Elites were similarly quiescent following terrorist attacks on British soil, O’Neill observed: “‘Don’t look back in anger’, we sang about that barbarism, yet when it comes to alleged ISIS members being executed after a fair trial the commentariat gets very angry.
“It is a perverse moral worldview that feels more put out by the execution of alleged mass murderers than by the mass murder itself.”
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