Did MoS video help nail Jihadi John?
A VIDEO of Jihadi John obtained by The Mail on Sunday could have been used by the security services to help track down and kill him, it emerged this weekend.
The short clip, published in August, is the last known footage of the Islamic State executioner before he was ‘evaporated’ in a drone strike by US forces said to have been working ‘hand in glove’ with British intelligence.
The mobile phone footage is the only video of the murderous fanatic other than the notorious ‘execution’ clips. It showed the terrorist – real name Mohammed Emwazi – unmasked in Syria for the first and only time, while he was recorded uttering a chilling threat to come back to the UK and ‘cut off heads’. But despite being shot in a barren, almost featureless landscape, experts now believe that it could have provided vital clues to the 27-year-old’s movements and contributed to Thursday’s air strike.
Trees and telephone masts can be seen in the background of the oneminute, 17-second footage, and crucially Emwazi is shown standing in front of a military-style flatbed truck, which could have been tracked.
In March, we revealed how Emwazi had contacted one of our reporters directly and told how he knew the British security services were closing in on him – and feared he was ‘a dead man walking’.
The Pentagon revealed on Friday that the US targeted Emwazi after months of ‘persistent surveillance’.
John Pike, a former director of military and intelligence analysis at the Federation of American Scientists, based in Washington DC, said that the video may well have helped locate Emwazi in Syria.
Mr Pike told The Mail on Sunday: ‘Our intelligence agencies love to track vehicles and so, if there was a particular vehicle in the video, they would try to find it and follow it and see if it led them to him.’
He added: ‘If there are buildings in the video that would also have been revealing. US intelligence has imagery of just about every building in ISIS territory. Particularly if two buildings are shown near each other, they can find them. That is one way they could have found the general area where he was hiding.’
The video was obtained from Syria by an activist linked to the Free Syrian Army, and passed to this newspaper. It is also thought to have been handed to counter-terrorism police in Bulgaria, and from them to the British and American security services.
The video is believed to have been filmed in June, just outside the southern Syrian city of Deir Ezzor by an associate or bodyguard of Emwazi. He was known to have stayed in the ISIS stronghold of Raqqa, as well as moving back and forth to Deir Ezzor.
It emerged this weekend that Coalition forces monitoring Syria first spotted Emwazi in June and came close to killing him, but he entered a crowded area at the time. He was then spotted again in August in a convoy of vehicles but forces were unable to kill him then. But on Thursday night, just before midnight, a Hellfire missile struck Emwazi as he walked out of a building in the main square of Raqqa, ISIS’s de facto capital in Syria, and was getting into his car. He was killed with at least one other British jihadi, who held Western hostages and then brutally beheaded them. Emwazi had become infamous as the masked figure who beheaded British hostages David Haines, 44, Alan Henning, 47, and Americans James Foley, 40, and Steven Sotloff, 31. Dr Sajjan Gohel, a terrorism expert at Asia-Pacific Foundation, said that after Emwazi’s identity was revealed in February, his role within ISIS changed from being its lead executioner to an online recruiter of Westerners.