Jihadi John: Mohammed Emwazi Recruited As Snitch By British Spies — But Refused, Report Says

Mohammed Emwazi, the young former Londoner identified Thursday as the the true identity of Jihadi John — the ISIS executioner made famous from his appearances in at least seven brutal ISIS videos — was targeted by the British spy agency MI-5, which wanted to recruit him as an informant, according to a report in Britain’s Daily Mail.

The masked ISIS militant known as Jihadi John appeared in six of those videos appearing to behead hostages from the United States, United Kingdom and most recently, Japan. In a seventh video, he appeared alongside two Japanese hostages, demanding that their government pay $200 million in ransom for their release.

Though British authorities have refused to confirm that Mohammed Emwazi — said to be a 27-year-old Kuwaiti-born British national who grew up in the Queen’s Park district of west London — and Jihadi John are the same person, a man identified as a friend of Emwazi has said that Emwazi is almost certainly the ISIS killer.

A prominent human rights organization also stated its belief that Emwazi and Jihadi John are one and the same.

The Inquisitr’s full report on Thursday’s bombshell reveal of Jihadi John’s allegedly true identity can be accessed at this link.

But though they will not say for sure that Emwazi is “John,” the former Londoner was known to British intelligence and law enforcement as far back as 2009, when he was detained after flying with two other young men to Tanzania and accused of intending to join the bloodthirsty Somalia-based Islamic terror group Al-Shabaab.

After that, Emwazi told friends that agents of MI-5 harassed him on a regular basis, attempting to bring him on board to snitch on suspected Islamic terrorists in Britain or elsewhere, the Daily Mail report revealed.

But Emwazi told friends he held out, not only refusing to serve as an MI-5 informant, but flatly denying that he had any links to terrorism at all. The surveillance, however, apparently contributed to Emwazi’s determination to flee London.

After he tried to fly to his native Kuwait in 2010, he was reportedly arrested and placed on a terrorism watch list that should have prevented him from leaving the United Kingdom.

“I feel like a prisoner, only not in a cage, in London,” he wrote to a friend, according to the report published Thursday. “A person imprisoned & controlled by security service men, stopping me from living my new life in my birthplace & country, Kuwait.”

Despite the surveillance, however, authorities now believe that in 2012, Mohammed Emwazi was somehow able to slip away and travel to Syria, where he joined with ISIS and became the terror group’s most famous member, the mysterious and brutal killer known until now only as Jihadi John.