“I will give him the number for your unregistered phone,” my source said after they hung up.
“Where does he live? In London?”
He confirmed this but said he couldn’t tell me more and that he had to leave. I took a train back to central London, checking often to see if anybody was following me.
As soon as I got to the hotel, I sent an encrypted message to Adam and Peter and gave them what I had so far. I also told them that I still had to meet with more sources and asked that nobody mention my name anywhere as the person who was on the ground for the Post in London.
Once I had met Emwazi’s friend, I’d have to go back to CAGE and confront them with our findings. I worried about someone trying to destroy my notes, so I took pictures of each page of my notebook and sent them to Peter and Adam.
“Did you get them?” I asked.
“Yes, but don’t worry, no one will ever be able to read your handwriting,” Adam said with a laugh.
It was clear that the Post would have to confront American and British authorities with our findings before we could publish the story. But first I hoped Emwazi’s friend would agree to meet me.
Finally, at about 8:00 p.m., I received a message on my unregistered phone from an unknown number: “Salam. I am the friend of Mohammed. I can meet you in one hour. Please come to the following address; you will be picked up from a different car then.”
So he knew I would most likely come by taxi and didn’t want anyone to know where we were going. After he sent the message, I received a call from the man I’d had tea with.
“Did the friend contact you?” he asked.
“Yes, he just did.”
“I thought since you weren’t sleeping much these days, you wouldn’t mind to meet in the evening, it’s better for him,” he said, giggling. He assured me I would be safe.
I had known this source for many years, and he had always helped me and been very particular about my safety, so I was not as nervous as I might have been about meeting someone I didn’t know alone in the middle of the night.
The place he wanted me to go to was almost an hour away by car. The address was a pub. When we got there, I double-checked it with the driver to make sure we were in the right place.
“Yes, my dear,” he said in his proper British accent. He sounded like the butler from Downton Abbey.
It was surreal to be meeting Jihadi John’s friend at a pub, even if it was just the pickup point. I’d gone through the dance of being dropped somewhere and then picked up to go somewhere else many times before, but I didn’t know what to expect this time. Could this person really be the second source I was looking for?
“Get out of the taxi, I can see you,” a new message on my phone read.
After my taxi had left, a car on the opposite side of the road turned on its lights, and I saw a man in the driver’s seat winking me in.
“I am Mohammed’s friend,” he said. I recognized his voice from earlier on the phone. He was in his late twenties but asked that I not reveal any further details about him.
Before I got in, I asked him for the kunya, or fighting name, of the man who had called me earlier and who had put us in contact. I wanted to be 100 percent sure that this was the right man.
He knew the answer. I got into the car.
He said that he would prefer if we could walk a little, even though by now it was dark. He stopped in a residential area where streetlights shone into the car. When we got out, he asked for my mobile phones. I hesitated at first because I’d planned to show him the video clip of Jihadi John, but then I remembered that I had some magazine and newspaper clips in my bag with pictures of the ISIS executioner, so I switched off the phones and left them in the trunk of his car.
We started walking toward a park nearby, which was really just a small grassy area with a bench. He took a tissue from his jacket pocket and wiped the bench. By the light of a streetlamp, I showed him the clips and photographs of Jihadi John.
“Is this your friend?”
“Yes, I am very sure it’s him. It’s my friend Mohammed Emwazi.”
Then he told me the same basic story I’d heard from Asim Qureshi. I asked how he knew Jihadi John was Emwazi, or vice versa.
“There is another friend of ours, he is there as well,” the man said, and then he stopped for a moment. “When the first video came out showing him with this journalist, our friend contacted me and said I should watch it and that it was our friend Mohammed there.”
He said that parts of the video had been shown on the news and that he’d watched it again and again. He believed that the voice and the eyes were indeed Emwazi’s.
He never went to the police because he feared getting in trouble. “I recognized his voice and the eyes, but the person I saw in the video is not the Mohammed who used to be my friend.”
“Why do you think he became who he has become?”
“I don’t know what he might have seen there in Syria the last few years. Maybe this changed him.”
“But wasn’t he always interested in going to fight? Wasn’t he planning to travel to Somalia, and that’s how he got into trouble?” I asked.
“He was interested in what happened in the Muslim world, including Somalia, and he felt the West was following unfair policies and double standards,” the man told me. But he didn’t understand how his old friend could cut off the heads of journalists and aid workers. “This is very difficult for me to swallow. I am asking myself the whole time, why Mohammed?”
I asked if he had a photo of his friend, but he said he didn’t. We walked back to the car, and he offered to drive me to a cabstand a bit closer to the city.
Back at the hotel, Adam, Peter, and I got on Skype, and I told them that we now had a second source: a friend of Emwazi’s who said he was Jihadi John.
“I guess we will have to contact British authorities now,” Peter said. He said he would speak to the Post’s top editors and let me know about next steps.
“I know it’s quite late where you are and it’s been a long day, but could you stay up so we can update you on what we are doing?” Peter asked.
I told him that I wouldn’t be able to sleep now anyway. The adrenaline was unbelievable. I understood that we had the name of one of the most wanted men in the world, but I wasn’t sure that British authorities wanted the full story out. Maybe I was being paranoid, but I wondered if MI5 would storm my hotel to try to get our information.
Adam pointed out that as soon as we contacted British authorities, the story might break anytime. “But let me check it with my sources here in the United States first,” he said. “Well, actually, if we ask the Americans for reaction, it’s very likely they will immediately tell the Brits.” He had a couple of trusted sources in the United States he could at least ask off the record, he said.