Emails Suggest ISIL Executioner ‘Jihadi John’ Had Suicidal Thoughts

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)

LONDON (AP) — Newly published emails suggest the man who became known as “Jihadi John” had suicidal thoughts before leaving Britain for Syria.

In an email exchange with the Mail on Sunday five years ago, he talked of taking too many sleeping pills and sleeping forever as a way to get away from British security service scrutiny. Mohammed Emwazi told a journalist at the newspaper in an email that he felt like a “dead man walking.”

Emwazi was revealed this week to be the Islamic State executioner known as “Jihadi John.” He has appeared in beheading videos brandishing a large knife.

Emwazi was a computer science graduate who lived in west London before leaving for Syria in 2013. He was interrogated by security services while in Britain but was never arrested or charged.

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  1. Avatar for tao tao says:

    Dead man walking? Sounds about right. His family sends A Special Big Thanks for giving them the same feeling. At this point his death is by far not the worst thing likely to happen to him.

  2. Yeah, too bad he didn’t act on those suicidal thoughts BEFORE becoming addicted to cutting peoples’ heads off with a small knife.

    However, I’m sure the enablers at Salon and ThinkProgress will insist that he was driven to it by despair stemming from British security service scrutiny.

  3. Well, what more proof do we need that this individual’s Iron Age superstitions are only incidental to his mental illnesses? And who but a misguided Fox News watching fool would indict otherwise peaceful individuals just for harboring the same Iron Age superstitions as this murdering attention-starved psychopath?

  4. Avatar for mymy mymy says:

    One more narcissist who feels that if I’m going to die, I’m going to make sure others go with me. Egoistic suicide becoming the end-of-the-world syndrome.

  5. Do we really have to give this coward a nickname?

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