Newly released emails written by the man known as “Jihadi John” have revealed that he harboured a sense of paranoia and sympathies for a jailed scientist linked to al-Qaeda in the years before he was identified as the killer on Isis videos in Syria.
The troubled state of mind of Mohammed Emwazi was revealed in an email to a former Independent journalist in which he said he suspected that he had unwittingly sold his laptop via the online sales site Gumtree to an undercover MI5 agent because the buyer knew his first name.
“I never told this person my first name!!” he said in an email to the journalist Robert Verkaik who was investigating claims that he was being harassed by MI5.
“I knew it was them!! Sometimes I feel like im a dead man walking, not fearing they may kill me.
“Rather, fearing that one day, I'll take as many pills as I can so that I can sleep for ever!! I just want to get away from these people!!!”
The emails emerged as a man calling himself Abu Ayman, a defector from Isis, told BBC News that Emwazi was a “cold” loner.
“He didn't talk much. He wouldn't join us in prayer,” he said.
“The other British brothers prayed with us, but he was strange. The other British brothers would say 'hi' when they saw us on the road, but he turned his face away.”
He said some Isis fighters “love him” and had joined the movement after “watching and admiring him”.
“Isis play him like a piano. He's a celebrity to attract our Muslim brothers in Europe, but some think he is showing off; they think he's being used by Isis.”
The former head of MI6, Sir John Sawers, and the Home Secretary Theresa May, have both dismissed claims by the campaign group Cage, which opposes UK anti-terrorism laws, that he was driven to extremism by MI5 harassment.
Emwazi, a computer programming graduate, was identified as a potential terrorist as early as 2009 by the authorities but was able to travel to Syria four years later.
Emwazi's email was written three months after he sent another to the campaign group Cage in which he expresses support for “our sister Aafia Siddiqui”.
This refers to a US-trained neuroscientist, currently serving a long jail term in the United States, who was considered to have links to senior Osama bin Laden lieutenants and was placed on an FBI list of the seven most-wanted fugitives from al-Qaeda in 2004.
However, there is widespread sympathy in Pakistan for the plight of a woman who was seen as being mentally ill, and the country's leaders have demanded her release.
Isis has also frequently called for her release from a Texas prison where she is serving 86 years for attempted murder after grabbing a gun and shooting at her interrogators following her arrest in Afghanistan.
She was found with documents on chemical weapons indicating attack planning.
Her freedom was said to be one of a litany of demands issued by Isis for the release of James Foley, the American journalist who was killed in August.
“Jihadi John” Emwazi rose to notoriety when he featured in the video of the killing.
In a cache of emails from late 2010 released on Saturday by Cage, which says it was in contact with Emwazi from 2010 until 2012, he wrote: “So please my dear brothers keep up your work. So that you can say on the Day of Judgement 'This is what I done for Aafia Siddiqui'…. May Allah bless you.”
The Independent