Italian aid worker spent 14 months in captivity and experienced brutality at the hands of ISIS members
Federico Motka’s abductors greeted him in English after he and his colleagues were kidnapped near a refugee camp on the Turkish border, telling him: “Welcome to Syria, you mutt.”
For the Italian aid worker, it was the beginning of 14 months of brutality at the hands of ISIS.
Mr Motka gave evidence about the ordeal on Thursday at the terrorism trial of El Shafee Elsheikh, a British citizen charged with taking a leading role in an ISIS kidnapping scheme that took more than 20 westerners hostage between 2012 and 2015.
Four Americans — journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff and aid workers Peter Kassig and Kayla Mueller — were among them. Foley, Sotloff and Kassig were decapitated.
Mueller was forced into slavery and raped repeatedly by ISIS leader Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi before she, too, was killed.
Mr Motka is the first surviving hostage to give evidence at Mr Elsheikh’s trial in Alexandria, Virginia.
Born in Trieste, Italy, Mr Motka said he spent much of his childhood in the Middle East and went to boarding school in England.
He was an aid worker surveying the needs of refugee camps in March 2013 when he and a colleague, Briton David Haines, were captured and taken hostage.
Four Americans — journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff and aid workers Peter Kassig and Kayla Mueller — were among them. Foley, Sotloff and Kassig were decapitated.
Mueller was forced into slavery and raped repeatedly by ISIS leader Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi before she, too, was killed.
Mr Motka is the first surviving hostage to give evidence at Mr Elsheikh’s trial in Alexandria, Virginia.
Born in Trieste, Italy, Mr Motka said he spent much of his childhood in the Middle East and went to boarding school in England.
He was an aid worker surveying the needs of refugee camps in March 2013 when he and a colleague, Briton David Haines, were captured and taken hostage.
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