London: A Daesh militant known as Jihadi John revealed that he knew that British security services were closing in on him and that he was a “dead man walking” in astonishing emails to a Mail on Sunday journalist.
His emails were sent before he left Britain to join Daesh in Syria.
At the time, Mohammad Emwazi, the man now unmasked as the knife-wielding fanatic, was claiming to be an innocent victim of MI5 persecution.
Emwazi, who would go on to orchestrate at least six hostage murders in Syria, said the harassment affected him so badly he was contemplating suicide. “I’ll take as many pills as I can so that I will sleep for ever,” he warned. His emails to Security Editor Robert Verkaik in December 2010 offer a remarkable insight into his state of mind at a time when he was already deeply immersed in extremism.
Some verge on the paranoid, with frequent complaints that his every move is being shadowed by intelligence officers.
The news comes amid a series of revelations that:
Emwazi was a member of a secret Osama Bin Laden sleeper cell based in Britain called The London Boys, which planned to carry out atrocities in the West;
He was involved with a violent street gang who targeted the wealthy residents of Belgravia with stun guns;
Emwazi was arrested trying to force his way past security on to a passenger flight from Dar es Salaam in Tanzania to Johannesburg without a passport in 2009.
The Daesh executioner’s father was a policeman in Kuwait before he moved his family to Britain. David Cameron will announce new plans to give spies greater powers to eavesdrop on terror suspects electronic communication.
A few months before he first contacted Verkaik, Emwazi was stopped at Heathrow and prevented from flying to Kuwait, where he was born.
He claimed he was interrogated by an aggressive officer who threw him against a wall, grabbed his beard and strangled him. He later complained to the Independent Police Complaints Commission.
It was as he awaited a response that he first met Verkaik, later sending him, over subsequent weeks, a series of emails chronicling his alleged victimisation.
In one, he recounts what he suggests was a sinister encounter with an MI5 agent.
Having advertised his laptop on classified adverts website Gumtree, he went to meet a prospective buyer at Maida Vale underground station near his West London home.
He wrote, ungrammatically: “When I sell anything via internet i always only write my surname in the ad, which is Emwazi ... I went to meet that person ... so that he could have a look at the laptop and if it satisfied him then he would buy it ...
“That person to my surprise didn’t even bother looking to see of the laptop works or not!!! (when you buy something, from someone you’ve never seen before you most likely would test the product!!) ...
“Anyway, in a matter of seconds, I gave him the laptop (thinking that hes going to test the laptop) and he gave me the money straightaway ... We shacked hands and he said ‘nice doing business with you Mohammed’. I NEVER TOLD THIS PERSON MY FIRST NAME! and I NEVER GIVE OUT MY FIRST NAME! IT He added: “I felt shocked, and paused for a few seconds as he walked away ... 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!!!”
Emwazi claimed the constant harassment wrecked his relationships with women. To illustrate a possible story, he said he would send “a picture of one of my past girlfriends, but I must ask her permission.”
It was not forthcoming.
Verkaik recalled: “Like many young Muslim men at the time who I had interviewed, he appeared to have a grievance against the police and MI5. But this man was different — in him was a warped sense of injustice that could never justify the barbaric acts of murder that he has gone on to carry out in Syria.”
Details of Emwazi’s remarkable encounter with the Mail on Sunday emerged as it was revealed that he was once part of a terrorist unit tasked by Osama Bin Laden with launching atrocities in Britain.
He was a member of a “sleeper” cell dubbed The London Boys, which included three operatives allegedly trained at an Al Qaeda camp in Somalia. All three were close associates of Emwazi. Until now, Emwazi was thought only to have been a peripheral figure among the capital’s extremists. Yet a court document seen by this newspaper alleges that he was closely involved in the cell’s activities, including the “provision of funds and equipment to Somalia ... for terrorism-related activity.”
Before his death, Bin Laden sent “angry” messages from his Pakistan hideout urging those returning from training to carry out attacks.
Inevitably, the depth of Emwazi’s involvement in extremism — during a period when he was being monitored by MI5 — will increase pressure on security chiefs, who have faced criticism for failing to stop him joining Daesh in Syria.
Details of Emwazi’s involvement in the terror cell emerged during a “control order” hearing at the High Court in London in 2011.
One of the cell members, referred to only as CE, challenged the order restricting his activities, but it was upheld after security chiefs expressed fears he would return to the UK.
During the hearing it emerged that the intelligence officer given the job of investigating Emwazi’s cell was inexperienced, having been with MI5 less than two years. Identified as AG, the officer was criticised for failing to read all the secret documents before the case was heard.
The judge also said AG was not aware of key details relating to control orders, which have since been scrapped, concerning members of the network. Last night, Labour said the Coalition should never have eroded security chiefs’ powers to restrict the activities of dangerous extremists.
Sources said David Cameron will use a report from Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee to give GCHQ and other security services more freedom to monitor terror suspects’ electronic communications.
Other members of Emwazi’s cell include Ebrahim Magag, a Somali-born former train conductor from London involved in arranging “financial support for Al Qaeda.” Magag was put under a control order to stop him fleeing overseas to join a jihad. But on Boxing Day 2012 he vanished. Officials believe he went to join British jihadis in East Africa.
