Surviving hostage relates ordeal in Islamic State captivity

ALEXANDRIA, Va. (AP) — Federico Motka's abductors greeted him in English after he and his colleagues were kidnapped near a refugee camp on the Turkish border: “Welcome to Syria, you mutt.”

For the Italian aid worker, it was the beginning of 14 months of brutality at the hands of the Islamic State.

Motka testified about the ordeal Thursday at the terrorism trial of El Shafee Elsheikh, a British national charged with taking a leading role in an Islamic State 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 the Islamic State’s leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, before she too was killed.

Motka is the first surviving hostage to testify at Elsheikh's trial in Alexandria, Virginia,

Born in Trieste, Italy, 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.

Motka testified that for the first month of captivity, he was only only occasionally mistreated, but that mistreatment frequently came at the hands of three captors hostages dubbed “the Beatles” because of their British accents. They learned to speak surreptitiously about their captors, who wore mask and took pains to conceal their identity, since they never knew what would set them off. A dispute over bathroom hygiene prompted a particularly intense beating, he said.

“They said I was a posh wanker because I went to boarding school,” Motka testified. “They said I was...