London -
The mother of Mohammed Emwazi realised he was Jihadi John when she saw a beheading video, it emerged yesterday.
Ghaneya Emwazi, 47, screamed on recognising her 26-year-old son as the knife-wielding fanatic in the horrific Islamic State propaganda film.
She confirmed he was the IS chief executioner when she and her husband Jasem, 51, were questioned by the Kuwaiti security services on Sunday.
Other appalled relatives of Emwazi on Monday condemned his actions and said they would welcome his death.
A Kuwaiti cousin, who would not give his name, said: “We hate him. We hope he will be killed soon. This will be good news for our family.”
Emwazi, who moved to north London from Kuwait aged six, was identified last week as Jihadi John - the man responsible for the murders of kidnapped journalists and aid workers in Syria.
His parents returned from the UK to Kuwait some time ago and are living in Taima, a rundown area of the city of Jahra.
Kuwait’s secret police questioned them as witnesses on Sunday about their son’s transformation from an ordinary British schoolboy into one of the world’s most wanted terrorists.
They told the officers he had lied in his last phone call to them from Turkey, claiming he was planning to travel to Syria to volunteer for humanitarian work.
Mrs Emwazi recognised her son in the IS video of the execution of American journalist James Foley, Kuwait’s respected Al Qabas newspaper said.
Her husband reportedly told the Kuwaiti police: “When his mother watched the film about Daesh (IS) she saw the young man covering his face in the James Foley video. He threatened the USA. He said he would kill. She was shocked. She became frantic and started screaming “This is my son”.
“We were all watching the video. We were scared to watch the video. Then we carried on watching it and we saw that it was Mohammed. We are completely distraught. My son is religious and he hates the West. He feels they have abused him.”
The video showing Mr Foley’s death was published online last August but it is not known when the family watched it.
Mr Emwazi was a police officer in Kuwait but lost his job and moved to Britain after Saddam Hussein’s 1990 invasion.
His family was accused of collaborating with the Iraqis during the seven-month occupation because they were stateless Bedoon people from Iraq.
Mr Emwazi is said now to be working in a supermarket in the strictly Islamic Gulf state.
His son worked for an IT software firm there until April 2010 after completing a computing degree at the University of Westminster in London.
His father reportedly told Kuwaiti police: “He was planning to get married but because he didn’t have enough money he decided to go back to the UK.
“Mohammed was religious when he was young. I haven’t been in contact with him since 2013.
“I got a call from him when he was in Turkey and he told us he was going to Syria to volunteer for a humanitarian campaign.
“He said, ‘Please forgive me if I do anything wrong’. It was the last call or contact I had with him.”
Emwazi was banned from re-entering Kuwait in May 2010 after the British authorities raised concerns about his links to extremism.
He claimed this cost him his job and his fiancée in the Gulf state.
There were questions on Monday night over why the family was granted permission to stay in the UK.
Ian Austin, a Labour member of the Commons home affairs committee, said: “Most reasonable people will want to know why they did not go to Baghdad instead of asking to be let into the UK, and questions must be asked why they were allowed to.”
- More than 30 000 Iraqi troops and militiamen launched a massive operation yesterday to drive Islamic State fighters from Tikrit, the home town of former leader Saddam Hussein.
Waves of airstrikes were reported to have hit IS positions around the city with fighting to the north and south in what is being seen as the latest test of Iraqi military units who fled from a jihadi offensive last year.
The city lies 95 miles north of the capital Baghdad, in Salahuddin province. Its Islamic State defenders are threatening to kill hostages.
Schoolmates mocked him as “Little Mo”
Fellow secondary school pupils bullied Mohammed Emwazi, calling him ‘Little Mo’.
Emwazi was also said to have self-esteem problems and was even given anger management therapy at Quintin Kynaston school in north-west London.
A former friend said a gang of older teenagers used to wait outside the school for Emwazi, then 14 and smaller and weaker than other boys his age.
“They would steal his lunch money and push him around a bit,” he said.
“He was very quiet and a bit scrawny back then so we used to call him Little Mo.”
The St John’s Wood school is subject to a Department for Education investigation after it emerged that at least three past pupils have joined Islamist terror groups and contemporaries of Emwazi have claimed young Muslims were “groomed” by radicals.
Its former headmistress, Jo Shuter, said she recalled Emwazi was bullied when he was 14, but denied there had been a problem with radicalisation.
She told the BBC on Monday: “He had some issues with being bullied, which we dealt with.
“By the time he got into the sixth form he, to all intents and purposes, was a hard-working aspirational young man who went on to the university that he wanted.
“There was never any sense that any of these young men as I knew them were radicalised when they were at school.”
One of Emwazi’s contemporaries at the school, Choukri Ellekhlifi, was killed in Syria after joining an al-Qaeda group and a third pupil, Mohammed Sakr, was killed in a US air strike on Al Shabaab fighters in Somalia.
Emwazi’s younger brother Omar, 21, was known as a member of the “Muslim Mafia” at Quintin Kynaston.
Islamist’s “private school bullies” moan
The Islamist campaigner who described killer Mohammed Emwazi as a “beautiful young man” claims he himself was turned into an “anti-white racist” at private school.
Asim Qureshi, 33, said he and other ethnic minority children were ghettoised at £18,000-a-year Whitgift in South London.
Rich white boys - particularly rugby players - apparently bullied and racially abused “five foot nothing Asians”. Mr Qureshi, the research director of pressure group Cage, has known Emwazi for years, and has been filmed urging Muslims to support jihad at a London rally.
Mr Qureshi, who lives in a £530 000 detached house in Surrey, was born in Britain to Pakistani parents and - thanks to his mother’s ice-cream business - was sent to 400-year-old Whitgift in Croydon.
He said: “We formed a ghetto very, very quickly amongst our ethnicities because, even though these kids came from very well-off families, they still had an intense level of racism.
“Especially the rugby lads, who were known to be extremely racist because they were built like tanks, all of them. Us small Asians, five foot nothing, would not stand a chance against them.”
Mr Qureshi made his remarks to American academics four years ago.
Daily Mail