“That’s actually what I told him, when he came to the office the first time, why don’t you start from the beginning,” Qureshi recalled. He said that Emwazi was a British citizen whose family had come from Kuwait. “They were Bidoon,” Qureshi told me, “so they weren’t seen as full Kuwaitis.” When the British ended the protectorate in 1961, about a third of the Kuwaiti population were denied citizenship; Emwazi’s family belonged to this group.
He had gone to a sort of charter school called Quintin Kynaston, in the tony London neighborhood of St. John’s Wood. The school drew students from all over the city, including many from poor and immigrant families. Two other boys who had gone there had also become Islamist fighters.
Emwazi’s trouble with the law began when he and two friends were arrested in Tanzania in May 2009. My ears perked up when I heard that. I was looking for clues that might confirm that Jihadi John was obsessed with Somalia, and I knew that Tanzania was a frequent stop on the way to Somalia at that time.
According to Emwazi’s account, the local police detained them when they landed in Dar es Salaam. He told CAGE they’d been threatened and, at some stage, mistreated by the Tanzanian police, who suspected that the three planned to travel to Somalia. He told CAGE they were on their way to go on safari before beginning university or getting married.
He and his companions flew back to Amsterdam, where they’d changed planes on the way to Tanzania. “He said that an MI5 officer interrogated him there, together with a supposedly Dutch intelligence officer,” Qureshi said. MI5 is Britain’s domestic intelligence service. The MI5 officer, too, believed Emwazi and his friends had been on their way to Somalia to join al-Shabab, a militant group allied with Al Qaeda that operates in the southern and central parts of the country. Emwazi denied the accusations and claimed that MI5 agents had tried to recruit him.
Emwazi and his friends were allowed to return to Britain, but he said that he and his family subsequently felt “under pressure” from MI5. In the fall of 2009, he again met with Qureshi, talking about visits from MI5 agents, calls to his home, and strange cars following him. Finally, he and his family decided it would be better for him to return to Kuwait.
“Mohammed was quite incensed,” Qureshi said. He felt “that he had been very unfairly treated.”
In Kuwait, Emwazi got a job at a computer company, according to emails he wrote to CAGE. He came back to London at least twice. “He wanted to get married to a woman in Kuwait and settle there,” Qureshi said. “The second time, he came back to finalize the wedding planning with his parents.”
In June 2010, Emwazi emailed CAGE to say that British counterterrorism officials had detained him again during that visit to London, searched his belongings, and fingerprinted him. When he and his father went to the airport the next day, the airlines said he was on a list and refused to let him board a flight back to Kuwait.
I asked Qureshi if I could read this part of the email myself.
“I had a job waiting for me and marriage to get started,” Emwazi wrote, but now he felt “like a prisoner, only not in a cage, in London. A person imprisoned & controlled by security service men, stopping me from living my new life in my birthplace & country, Kuwait.”
I was surprised by the language in the email, which was very thoughtful. These were the words of someone who sounded emotional and slightly desperate. It wasn’t how I envisioned the person I’d seen in videos cutting off journalists’ heads. While reading his letter, I tried to picture the man in the black mask as its author. “What does he look like?” I asked. “Do you have a photograph?”
“No, we don’t,” Qureshi answered, but he described Emwazi as tall and good-looking with brownish skin and the fine features common in the Gulf. When he came to the CAGE offices, he brought sweets. Qureshi said he was very polite and grateful for their support and advice.
I had already typed his name into Google when I’d heard it from the ISIS source for the first time, but there had been no pictures. Either he was never very fond of social media or someone had cleaned up after him.
Qureshi said he’d last heard from Emwazi in January 2012, when Emwazi sent an email seeking more advice.
“No more emails or calls?”
“No, nothing from him,” Qureshi said.
“Do you know if he is still in the United Kingdom or if he has left the country?” I tried to avoid the word “Syria.”
“No, we don’t know,” Qureshi said, adding that he had emailed Emwazi in 2014 to check in, but there was no response.
I thanked Qureshi for his time and said I would be in touch again soon.
When I stepped out of the coffee shop, I felt as if I were carrying a weight. I was almost certain that Mohammed Emwazi was indeed Jihadi John. At the hotel, I went through all my notes from the conversations I’d had so far, and then watched some of the videos I’d downloaded on the Post server, because downloading certain violent online content was forbidden by Britain’s Terrorism Act of 2006. I wasn’t sure how the authorities would react to this Emwazi story, but I planned to leave the United Kingdom before it was published.
As I watched the videos, I tried to find one that offered a clearer view of his eyes. I took a screenshot and filmed some of the video clips on my phone.
But so far I had only one source, the senior ISIS official. I needed more. On one of my unregistered phones and SIM cards, I called my source in the United Kingdom who had already indicated that he knew something.
“I’m here in London,” I told him. “I need to have tea with you.”
“You are welcome,” he said.
I had to travel outside the city to meet him, and he warned me that he had time for only one cup of tea.
“It’s okay, this won’t take much time. You just have to tell me is Mohammed Emwazi this man?” I showed him the screenshot I’d taken of Jihadi John.
He looked at the photograph and then looked at me.
“Wait, we haven’t even ordered the tea yet,” he said, beginning to laugh.
We asked for tea, switched off our phones, and put them a few meters away from us, next to speakers blaring a mix of Hindi and Arabic music.
“You look tired. Are you not sleeping much?” he asked me. I acknowledged that this story wasn’t giving me much time to sleep.
“You know, one day a couple of months ago, a young man whom I had met on different occasions came to me and said he believed his friend was the man in black,” he finally began. “He said that from the voice and the body language and the eyes, he felt that this was someone he used to know, and he was the one who mentioned something about Somalia and other stories.”
I began to tremble. Maybe it was because I was exhausted, or because I felt we were very close to getting a second source.
“Did he tell you the name of his friend?” I asked.
“Yes. It was the name you mentioned, Mohammed Emwazi.”
He asked me to keep his comments off the record, given the sensitivity of the case, but promised to put me in touch with Emwazi’s friend. He picked up his phone, dialed a number, and spoke to the man, trying to convince him to meet me. He even handed me the phone so we could say Salam and I could hear his voice.
“I’d like to meet you,” I told him, but he didn’t agree then and there.