For Florida’s Sotloff family, guilty verdict for ISIS militant is no salve for the pain
Almost nine years after the Islamic State shared gruesome videos of American journalists being beheaded in the Syrian desert — including Pinecrest’s Steven Sotloff — a British militant was found guilty for taking part in a spree of kidnapping, torture and murder.
On Thursday, El Shafee Elsheikh became the first member of a militant group nicknamed “The Beatles” to be convicted by a U.S. jury, the Washington Post reported. Elsheikh was found guilty of conspiring to murder American journalists Sotloff and James Foley and humanitarian workers Peter Kassig and Kayla Mueller. He faces a mandatory life sentence.
Elsheikh and Alexanda Kotey were captured in 2018 while trying to flee Syria and faced trial in the United States. Kotey pleaded guilty in the same Virginia court and awaits sentencing. The third member of the so-named Beatles, British terrorist Mohammed Emwazi, the masked ISIS militant known as Jihadi John, was killed in a U.S.-led airstrike in November 2015. Aine Davis, who is imprisoned in Turkey on terrorism charges, was initially thought to be a member of the group responsible for Sotloff and Foley’s deaths. But an FBI special agent at Elsheikh’s trial testified that there were actually three, not four, “Beatles” in the group.
For Sotloff’s parents, who watched the trial in Virginia, the verdict doesn’t bring closure.
“Not really,” said Arthur Sotloff, Steven’s father. “But it gives me a reason to keep on living,” he said from the Boynton Beach home he shares with his wife, Steven’s mother Shirley.
READ MORE: Pain and progress: How Steven Sotloff’s family has coped with his death on world stage
During the pandemic the couple downsized from the Pinecrest home they raised their son and daughter, Lauren, in for a smaller place in Palm Beach County.
Steven Joel Sotloff was born at South Miami Hospital on May 11, 1983. On Sept. 2, 2014, the world learned the 31-year-old’s fate when a video of his beheading was posted to the internet by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.
Sotloff, the grandson of Holocaust survivors and a freelance writer for Time and the Christian Science Monitor, was kidnapped in August 2013 at a false government checkpoint near Aleppo, Syria’s largest city. He had crossed into Syria from Turkey to cover the Syrian civil war. The Islamic State had set up the checkpoint.
Closure is hard to come by.
“Finding Steven’s remains maybe [would] give us a closure. I don’t think they exist anymore. I think he’s gone completely,” Art Sotloff said.
“Justice has been done and it’s been done for our kids,” Sotloff said. “And I really felt when I was there, when I was in the room for two-and-a-half weeks, that Steven, and the other kids or people that were with him, were in the room with us. And that gave me a lot of strength to sit through the trial. Very, very, very hard. Listening to all the captives that were freed because their countries paid to get the kids out and listening to the stories firsthand of what everybody went through, especially Steven, was really heartbreaking.”
The guilty verdict and the guilty plea by Kotey last September isn’t a salve for the pain that still lingers.
“This trial has been two years in the making and the millions and millions of dollars that the government spent to find these individuals guilty for killing our kids, that money could have been used to save our kids and giving us, the families, the opportunity to bring our kids home. But that wasn’t the case,” Sotloff said.
“And I still hold our government responsible. For some reason our kids weren’t significant enough to be bargained for, or paid a ransom for, for even the opportunity to save their lives. And that’s a disgrace. And that’s something that the Obama administration will always have over their heads — that their hands were on the knife that killed my son,” Sotloff said.
He adds that he and wife Shirley were in agreement with the other families who pushed to forgo seeking the death penalty to secure Britain’s support for the prosecution.
“Otherwise we weren’t going to have the opportunity to bring the trial here and that took us over a year. And the death penalty, or being executed, would only give him the glory that he’s looking for because that’s what they believe in. And the 72 virgins that doesn’t exist. Try finding one today,” Sotloff said with a soft chuckle, referencing the belief some jihadist terrorists say is granted to them in paradise after death.
“We felt that the death penalty or being executed wouldn’t be better, especially if he was found guilty, because he’ll spend 23 hours a day in his cell and maybe an hour looking at some sunshine and brushing his teeth.”
This story was originally published April 15, 2022 at 5:16 PM.
