Reports Identify Islamic State Executioner ‘Jihadi John’

A man identified as Steven Joel Sotloff with a member of ISIS ISIS behead US Journalist James Wright Foley on video - Aug 2014 (Rex Features via AP Images)
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“Jihadi John,” the black-clad English-speaking Islamic State militant thought to be shown beheading the group’s hostages on video, was alleged on Thursday by the Washington Post and the BBC to be a man named Mohammed Emwazi.

The Washington Post cited friends and others familiar with Emwazi’s case in its report identifying the suspected Islamic State executioner. The BBC did not cite its sources.

British officials declined to comment on the reports. NSC spokeswoman Bernadette Meehan said in a statement that the U.S. “will not comment on ongoing investigations and therefore are not in a position to confirm or deny the identity of this individual.”

FBI Director James Comey said in September that the U.S. believed it had identified the Islamic State militant who executed American hostages, but did not release the name.

Emwazi, thought to be in his mid-20s, was born in Kuwait and grew up in a “well-to-do” West London family before graduating from the University of Westminster with a degree in computer programming, according to the Washington Post.

E-mails obtained by the Post suggested Emwazi was motivated to leave England for the Middle East after he was detained by authorities in two separate incidents: once while en route to a safari trip in Tanzania in 2009, and a second time while traveling between London and Kuwait in 2010 to finalize plans for his wedding.

“I had a job waiting for me and marriage to get started,” Emwazi wrote in a June 2010 e-mail to a British human rights worker he often corresponded with, as quoted by the Post. “I feel like a prisoner, only not in a cage, in London. A person imprisoned & controlled by security service men, stopping me from living my new life in my birthplace & country, Kuwait.”

This post has been updated.

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  1. So being detained makes you want to execute and behead a person who did nothing to you? I suspect this guy had issues long before he was “detained”.

  2. It certainly shows that jobs and opportunity aren’t sufficient to stop young people from being radicalized. I think we need to consider that humans evolved to get great mental and physical stimulation from risk and adventure. It releases scads of neurotransmitters, and can rapidly become addicting as most extreme sport practitioners have found. Struggling for some goal, even a foolish one such as trying to revive a medieval caliphate that was hardly perfect in it’s own time, will have an appeal to some young people, especially when cleverly packaged.

    As far him being detained, which came first? The Tanzanian authorities detained him because there was reason to think he wasn’t planning to go on safari at all, but was planning to go join al-Shabbab in Somalia. Tourism is a critical revenue source in Tanzania, and they have little interest in harassing tourists for no reason.

  3. “I feel like a prisoner, only not in a cage, in London. A person
    imprisoned & controlled by security service men, stopping me from
    living my new life in my birthplace & country, Kuwait.”

    Touching. What’s hard to comprehend is the response: imprisoning people who had nothing to do with any of his problems and brutally and gratuitously killing them in cold blood.

  4. A girl from Scotland who’s now about 20 went to Syria a few years ago to become a jihadist and is now one of the biggest recruiters of other young women to leave home and go to Syria and join violent jihadists. Three young British women have recently gone missing, and the families are distraught because it is girls like these that are often used as suicide bombers.

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