Two members of the Isis “Beatles” terror cell were identified after they boasted about being arrested while opposing an English Defence League (EDL) march years before, police have revealed.
Alexanda Kotey and El Shafee Elsheikh were involved in the kidnapping of at least 27 people in Syria between 2012 and 2015, including aid workers and journalists who were later executed in Isis propaganda videos.
In 2011, the year before they travelled to join Isis, the pair were arrested as part of a group of Islamist extremists over a stabbing during clashes with the far-right EDL.
They were freed without charge but their comments on the incident years later in Syria helped British police trace their identities and gather evidence used in a US prosecution.
Kotey has been jailed for life after admitting eight charges, including conspiracy to commit hostage-taking resulting in death and conspiracy to murder US citizens, while Elsheikh was convicted after denying the crimes and will be sentenced on Friday.
The Metropolitan Police’s Counter Terrorism Command began an investigation into the then-unidentified militants in November 2012, following the abduction of British photographer John Cantlie and American journalist James Foley.
Commander Richard Smith told a press conference the militants involved kept their faces covered and withheld their names from hostages, leaving investigators scrambling for any “breadcrumbs” that might lead to their identification.
The first clue was the British accents that led the captors to be dubbed “The Beatles”, narrowing them down to the pool of foreign fighters who went to Syria from the UK.
“It was from the accounts of freed hostages and intelligence that we realised they were UK nationals, possibly from London,” Mr Smith said.
“One piece of information, which was fairly unremarkable on the face of it to the hostages, proved very significant to us, and this was the recollection of a conversation where one of the captors mentioned he had been arrested at an EDL march in London while taking part in a counter-demonstration.
“Based on that snippet of conversation, our investigation team was able to go back and identify a particular EDL march that took place in London on 11 September 2011.”
The demonstration, on the 10th anniversary of 9/11, had seen members of Muslims Against Crusades – an offshoot of Anjem Choudary’s al-Muhajiroun organisation that was banned as a terrorist group months later – burn an American flag and chant “USA terrorists” outside the US embassy.
They fought running battles with members of the EDL in the surrounding area after evading police attempts to keep the opposing groups apart.
“A stabbing occurred linked to that march and a group of individuals had been arrested on suspicion of involvement,” Mr Smith said.
“From our records, we found that two of those individuals were Kotey and Elsheikh. Both of them were both released without charge for that offence but the information was invaluable in helping us zero in on them as being the men the hostages had described to us.”
Police officers had taken footage of the two men at the demonstration, and after their arrest, their fingerprints were taken and they were interviewed.
The evidence showed that they had been “associates for some time” before travelling to Syria, and they were also linked to Mohammed Emwazi, the Isis executioner who became known as Jihadi John.
His identity was proven after footage of police interviews over a spate of London bike thefts in 2012 was forensically compared to the voice of the masked militant in footage of the execution of Mr Foley and other victims.
A voice message that Elsheikh sent to his brother while in Syria was also matched to another police interview tape from 2009.
