‘Jihadi John,’ Executioner in ISIS Videos, Had Early Encounter With British Intelligence

LONDON — Mohammed Emwazi was 6 when his parents moved to West London from his birthplace in Kuwait, and he seems to have lived a normal life, studying hard and graduating in computer sciences from the University of Westminster in 2009.

But he came to the attention of the British intelligence services in May that same year, detained as he landed in Tanzania with two friends on what he described as a celebratory safari. British officials thought he and his friends were headed to Somalia, to fight with the terrorist group Al Shabab, and allegedly tried to recruit him as an informant before shipping him back home.

Mr. Emwazi was identified on Thursday as the masked Islamic State fighter called “Jihadi John,” and his journey from computer student to a murderous spokesman for the Islamic State is only beginning to come clear. How and when he was radicalized, and whether the British intelligence services were at fault — either dealing with him too harshly or not identifying him as a serious threat soon enough — is already the subject of hot debate.

How has ISIS, a 21st-century terrorist organization with a retrograde religious philosophy, spread from Iraq to Syria, Libya and beyond?

The dilemma for security services is the same all over the West, whether in Britain, France or now in the United States, as some young Muslims are becoming radicalized or seeking to join a jihad. Given important constitutional and legal protections, how do counterterrorism and police officials draw the line when they find enough evidence to suspect someone, but do not have enough to prosecute them, or even to keep them under legal surveillance?

Mr. Joshi said there were doubts about CAGE’s “crude and simplistic” narrative of radicalization because of police mistreatment, saying that there was evidence of Mr. Emwazi’s involvement with Somalia before he was ever detained, and long before the Syrian civil war and the rise of Islamic State.

Mr. Emwazi first showed up in Islamic State videos in August, when he appeared to behead the American journalist James Foley and deliver threats against the West. The actual execution was not included in the video.

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. Last month, he appeared in a video with Haruna Yukawa and Kenji Goto, both Japanese hostages, shortly before they were killed.

Katrin Bennhold and Kimiko de Freytas-Tamura contributed reporting from London, and Eric Schmitt from Washington.

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The New York Times