Mohammed Emwazi The man behind the mask

In the months since Jihadi John was killed in a drone strike last November, a complex picture has emerged of the man behind the mask.

Mohammed Emwazi grew up in North Kensington, west London. He had once dreamt of playing for Manchester United and had told relations he was working for Red Crescent, the Islamic relief charity, in Turkey. By early 2013, however, detectives had told his family he was in Syria.

Despite this knowledge, Emwazi kept in sporadic phone contact with his family, insisting he was still in Turkey. In reality, he was working his way up the chain of command with Islamic State of Iraq of the Levant (Isil) and starting a family. He got married in 2013 and had a son.

His last contact with his family was in early 2014, about six months before the release of a video in which he appeared to behead American journalist James Foley.

By that stage, police had questioned his parents and his younger brother Omar, but his identity had not been released. The masked man, then known only as Jihadi John, appeared in more beheading videos.

Emwazi was born in Kuwait and moved to London with his family in 1994, when he was six.

In a school yearbook from 1996 Emwazi wrote: “What I want to be when I grow up is a footballer.”

His former head teacher at Quintin Kynaston Community Academy in St John’s Wood recalled a “hardworking aspirational young man”. She insisted she was not aware of any radicalisation of pupils.

He studied information technology at the University of Westminster. But the turning point in his life appeared to come with a trip to Tanzania in 2009 after graduating. He later said he had been accused by the British of planning to join al-Shabaab fighters in Somalia.