‘Jihadi John’ identified as Kuwaiti-born UK citizen
Emwazi first showed up in August when he appeared to behead US journalist James Foley
The man in the black balaclava who seems to have beheaded several foreign hostages in Daesh videos has been identified by British security services as Mohammad Emwazi, a British citizen from London.
Known in the news media as “Jihadi John,” he is said to have been born in Kuwait and traveled to Syria in 2012.
His name was first published yesterday on the website of the Washington Post .
The story was confirmed by a senior British security official, who said that the British government had identified Emwazi some time ago but had not disclosed his name for operational reasons.
Emwazi, 27, grew up in West London and graduated from the University of Westminster with a degree in computer programming. He first showed up in Daesh videos in August, when he appeared to behead the American journalist James Foley and deliver threats against the West.
The same man was apparently seen in the videos of the beheadings of a second American journalist Steven J. Sotloff; the British aid worker David Cawthorne Haines; the British taxi driver Alan Henning; and the American aid worker Peter Kassig.
Japanese hostages
Last month, he appeared in a video with Japanese hostages Haruna Yukawa and Kenji Goto, shortly before they were killed.
Emwazi apparently became radicalized after being detained by the authorities after a flight with friends to Tanzania in 2009 for a safari after graduation. He was detained and accused by British intelligence officers of trying to make his way to Somalia.
Friends of his told The Post that Emwazi and two others — a German convert to Islam named Omar and another man, Abu Talib — never made it to the safari. On landing in Dar Al Salaam, Tanzania, in May 2009, they were detained by the police and held overnight before eventually being deported, they said.
Asim Qureshi, a research director at CAGE, a British advocacy organization opposed to what it calls the “war on terror,” met with Emwazi in the fall of 2009. “Mohammad was quite incensed by his treatment, that he had been very unfairly treated,” Qureshi told The Post .
Emwazi then moved to Kuwait, his birthplace, working for a computer company, and he returned to London at least twice, Qureshi said. British counterterrorism officials detained Emwazi in June 2010, fingerprinting him and searching his belongings.
“I had a job waiting for me and marriage to get started,” he wrote in a June 2010 email to Qureshi. But now, “I feel like a prisoner, only not in a cage, in London.
A person imprisoned & controlled by security servicemen, stopping me from living my new life in my birthplace & country, Kuwait.” Qureshi said he had last heard from Emwazi in January 2012.
Shiraz Maher, a senior fellow at the International Center for the Study of Radicalization and Political Violence, at King’s College London, said on Twitter that Emwazi, “middle class & educated, demonstrates again that radicalization is not necessarily driven by poverty or social deprivation.”
British officials estimate that there are at least 500 homegrown militants fighting in Syria and Iraq, some of whom have returned to Britain.