FALLS CHURCH: Defense lawyers for a British national facing trial later this month for helping the Daesh group torture and behead American hostages are seeking to block testimony from a Kurdish girl held as a slave by the group.
The girl, identified only as Jane Doe in court documents, was abducted at age 15 from Kurdistan in August 2014 and held by Daesh. She spent several weeks in captivity with American Kayla Mueller, whose death at the hands of Daesh will be a key issue at trial.
The defendant, El Shafee Elsheikh, is charged with playing a key role in Mueller’s abduction, ransom and eventual death, along with three other Americans: journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff and aid worker Peter Kassig.
In court papers filed late Tuesday, Elsheikh’s lawyers say Jane Doe was told after her abduction to forget about her family because she would be “selected for marriage” by a Daesh fighter.
Doe escaped, but she was caught the next morning and beaten with sticks, belts and hoses. It was then that she was taken to a prison, where Mueller was also held, according to the defense memo.
After a month, Doe, Mueller, and two other girls were taken into captivity by a senior Daesh leader named Abu Sayyaf, where they were locked in a bedroom other than when they were cleaning or gardening.
Doe escaped the home in October 2014 and made her way back into Kurdish custody. Information she provided helped US fighters launch a raid in May 2015 that killed Abu Sayyaf and other Daesh fighters, according to the memo.
Mueller, who was killed in February 2015, was raped by Daesh leader, Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi, during her time in captivity, according to the indictment.
Inside the house, US fighters recovered Daesh documents justifying slavery and guidelines for how it should be implemented.
Elsheikh’s lawyers are seeking to keep the slavery documents from being introduced at trial, and want to severely limit Doe’s testimony, restricting it only to her time in captivity with Mueller.
The evidence “is unduly inflammatory and would only cause undue prejudice against Mr. Elsheikh, confuse the issues, and mislead the jury by imputing the actions of others to Mr. Elsheikh,” defense lawyers Nina Ginsberg, Edward MacMahon and Jessica Carmichael wrote.
While Doe’s testimony may not central to the case against Elsheikh, it provides a glimpse into some of the emotionally powerful evidence jurors will confront if the case indeed goes to trial at the end of the month.
Elsheikh is one of four British nationals who joined Daesh, dubbed “the Beatles” by their captives because of their accents. Elsheikh and a co-defendant, Alexenda Kotey, were captured in Syria in 2018 and brought to Virginia in 2020 to stand trial in federal court.
Kotey pleaded guilty last year and is awaiting sentencing. A third Beatle, Mohammed Emwazi, also known as “Jihadi John,” was killed in a 2015 drone strike. The fourth member was sentenced to prison in Turkey.
Federal prosecutors will respond to the defense memo about Jane Doe at a later date. So far, though, prosecutors have been successful in turning aside defense efforts to restrict evidence at trial. The presiding judge, T.S. Ellis III, ruled earlier this year that prosecutors can use incriminating statements Elsheikh made in interrogations and in media interviews. Defense lawyers argued unsuccessfully that the statements were coerced.
As for the slavery documents, defense lawyers argue that it would be unfair to ascribe them to Elsheikh because he did not write them. But in a 2018 interview with journalist Jenan Moussa after he was captured, Elsheikh said slavery was justified under Islamic law.
“Islamic texts have spoken about slavery and rights of a slave. There is a whole jurisprudence about slavery and the rights of slaves and the rights of slave owners,” he said in an interview.
Defense lawyers seek to restrict testimony from Daesh ‘slave’
https://arab.news/ntmk7
Defense lawyers seek to restrict testimony from Daesh ‘slave’
- The girl, identified only as Jane Doe in court documents, was abducted at age 15 from Kurdistan in August 2014 and held by Daesh
- The defendant, El Shafee Elsheikh, is charged with playing a key role in Mueller's abduction, ransom and eventual death
Only 4% women on ballot as Bangladesh prepares for post-Hasina vote
- Women PMs have ruled Bangladesh for over half of its independent history
- For 2026 vote, only 20 out of 51 political parties nominated female candidates
DHAKA: As Bangladesh prepares for the first election since the ouster of its long-serving ex-prime minister Sheikh Hasina, only 4 percent of the registered candidates are women, as more than half of the political parties did not field female candidates.
The vote on Feb. 12 will bring in new leadership after an 18-month rule of the caretaker administration that took control following the student-led uprising that ended 15 years in power of Hasina’s Awami League party.
Nearly 128 million Bangladeshis will head to the polls, but while more than 62 million of them are women, the percentage of female candidates in the race is incomparably lower, despite last year’s consensus reached by political parties to have at least 5 percent women on their lists.
According to the Election Commission, among 1,981 candidates only 81 are women, in a country that in its 54 years of independence had for 32 years been led by women prime ministers — Hasina and her late rival Khaleda Zia.
According to Dr. Rasheda Rawnak Khan from the Department of Anthropology at Dhaka University, women’s political participation was neither reflected by the rule of Hasina nor Zia.
“Bangladesh has had women rulers, not women’s rule,” Khan told Arab News. “The structure of party politics in Bangladesh is deeply patriarchal.”
Only 20 out of 51 political parties nominated female candidates for the 2026 vote. Percentage-wise, the Bangladesh Socialist Party was leading with nine women, or 34 percent of its candidates.
The election’s main contender, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, whose former leader Zia in 1991 became the second woman prime minister of a predominantly Muslim nation — after Pakistan’s Benazir Bhutto — was the party that last year put forward the 5 percent quota for women.
For the upcoming vote, however, it ended up nominating only 10 women, or 3.5 percent of its 288 candidates.
The second-largest party, Jamaat-e-Islami, has not nominated a single woman.
The 4 percent participation is lower than in the previous election in 2024, when it was slightly above 5 percent, but there was no decreasing trend. In 2019, the rate was 5.9 percent, and 4 percent in 2014.
“We have not seen any independent women’s political movement or institutional activities earlier, from where women could now participate in the election independently,” Khan said.
“Real political participation is different and difficult as well in this patriarchal society, where we need to establish internal party democracy, protection from political violence, ensure direct election, and cultural shifts around female leadership.”
While the 2024 student-led uprising featured a prominent presence of women activists, Election Commission data shows that this has not translated into their political participation, with very few women contesting the upcoming polls.
“In the student movement, women were recruited because they were useful, presentable for rallies and protests both on campus and in the field of political legitimacy. Women were kept at the forefront for exhibiting some sort of ‘inclusive’ images to the media and the people,” Khan said.
“To become a candidate in the general election, one needs to have a powerful mentor, money, muscle power, control over party people, activists, and locals. Within the male-dominated networks, it’s very difficult for women to get all these things.”
