Tag: london

Jihadi John Unmasked: Mohammed Emwazi – The Murderer From London

He is one of the world’s most wanted militants and the symbol of brutality by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

Known as ‘Jihadi John’, the black-clad militant brandishing a knife and speaking with an English accent in videos by ISIS is said to be Mohammed Emwazi, a 26-year-old Londoner, according to Washington Post.

Here is a look at the man behind the mask:

Born to a middle-class family

Emwazi was born in Kuwait but moved to Britain with his family when he was six years old. He arrived in London speaking only a few words of English. His father found work as a minicab and delivery van driver, while his mother was a housewife.

The family live in a small apartment in the west London neighbourhood in Queen’s Park. Emwazi has two younger sisters and a younger brother.

He was reported to have occasionally prayed at a mosque in Greenwich, south-east London.

Polite and mild-mannered in school

The young Emwazi was described as polite and mild-mannered. He appeared to embrace British life, playing football regularly and supporting Manchester United. The Daily Mail newspaper published a picture of Emwazi smiling and sitting cross-legged on the grass with his classmates from the St Mary Magdalene Church of England primary school in Maida Vale, West London.

Despite his limited command of the English language, Emwazi was popular in school as he was often engaged in sports, especially football, with his classmates.

He was the only Muslim in class and one former classmate recalled a lesson when Emwazi got up from his seat and shared with the class about his religion. “He wrote Arabic on the board to show us what it looked like..He showed us a religious text and spoke about what his religion was about,” said the classmate.

When he grew older, Emwazi was known among friends as polished and having a penchant for wearing stylish clothes while adhering to the tenets of his Islamic faith. He had a beard and was mindful of making eye contact with women, friends said.

Influenced by radicals in university

After finishing primary school in 1999, he moved to Quintin Kynaston Community Academy in St John’s Wood, where he became more observant of his religion and began wearing more traditional Islamic attire. But it was after he was admitted to the University of Westminster to study computing that his behaviour began to change, according to media reports.

The university has been linked to several proponents of radical Islam and Emwazi appeared to have fallen under their sway, it was reported.

Enwazi graduated in 2009 in information technology. However, instead of building a computing career, he ended up on the radar of the British intelligence service MI5.

“Harassed” by British intelligence service

Emwazi claimed he was harassed by MI5 over a planned trip to Tanzania in May 2009. He reportedly emailed Cage charity, which campaigns for those detained on terrorism charges, to say that he had been harassed by MI5 which tried to recruit him as an informant.

Asim Qureshi, research director of Cage, said after Emwazi’s graduation from university in 2009, he travelled to Tanzania for what he said was a safari holiday with two friends – a German convert to Islam named Omar and another man called Abu Talib.

But the trio were refused entry and held by police once they arrived in Tanzania. They were later put on a plane to Amsterdam, where Emwazi claimed he was questioned by a MI5 agent called Nick. The British officer accused him of planning to travel to Somalia to join Al-Shabaab, an al-Qaeda linked militant group.

“He knew everything about me; where I lived, what I did, the people I hanged around with. He also believed that I was lying and I wanted to go to Somalia,” Emwazi wrote in his email to Cage.

“I said to him that ‘I have just shown you my ticket for going to Tanzania’. Now the argument had started going back and forth, same thing again and again, like in a circle. He just wanted to force it out of my mouth that I intended to go to Somalia. But I stood firm and maintained that I had no reason to go to Somalia.

“He said that he was going to keep in touch and call me regularly. He even said that he would try to visit me,” he said.

None of the events mentioned by Emwazi have been verified by the British intelligence service.

“A prisoner in London”

After the Tanzania episode, Emwazi moved back to his birthplace of Kuwait. He had found a job working for a computer company but he returned to London on two occasions, the second time in June 2010 to finalise his wedding plans to a woman in Kuwait.

According to Mr Quershi, Emwazi was stopped by counter-terrorism officers in Britain who detained him and took his fingerprints. He was also reportedly stopped from travelling back to Kuwait the following day while intelligence officers investigated him.

In a frustrated email to Mr Quershi at the time, Emwazi allegedly wrote: “I had a job waiting for me and marriage to get started.”

“I feel 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 and country, Kuwait,” he wrote.

Sympathy for other militants

Besides the alleged harassment by MI5, Emwazi was reportedly upset when an al-Qaeda terrorist was convicted for the attempted murder of US nationals in Afghanistan. US-trained neuroscientist Aafia Siddiqui became a cause celebre in the Muslim world after she was jailed for 86 years for a shooting which took place while she was being questioned as an al-Qaeda suspect in Afghanistan in 2008.

Following her conviction, Emwazi was alleged to have written that he had “heard the upsetting news regarding our sister.This should only keep us firmer towards fighting for freedom and justice!”

He has also been linked to another British militant, Bilal al Berjawi, a leader of Al-Shabaab. The Lebanese born militant travelled to Kenya in February 2009, telling his family he was heading for a safari trip. He and a friend were detained in Nairobi and sent back to London but made it to Somalia in October that year.

So it is likely that Emwazi’s own safari trip a few months later in May, from Britain to Tanzania, set off alarms with the British security services. Berjawi was killed in Somalia in 2012 in a US drone attack.

A quiet, intelligent ISIS militant

Emwazi is believed to have travelled to Syria around 2012 and later joined the ISIS, the group whose barbarity he has come to symbolise. It is unclear how he managed to travel to Syria despite being on MI5 watchlist. “He was upset and wanted to start a life elsewhere,” said one of his friends.

A former hostage said Emwazi was part of a team in charge of guarding Western hostages at a prison in Idlib, Syria, dubbed “the box”. One former hostage said Emwazi was there with two other men with British accents. Emwazi was described as quiet, intelligent and “the most deliberate”.

One former hostage said Emwazi was obsessed with Somalia and made his captives watch videos on the Al-Shabaab militant group.

In early 2014, the hostages were moved to a prison in the Syrian city of Raqqa, the de facto capital of the ISIS, where they were visited often by the trio. They appeared to have taken on more powerful roles within the militant group, said the former hostages.

‘Jihadi John’: The face of ISIS brutality

A video was released by ISIS in August 2014 showing a masked man raging against the United States before apparently beheading US citizen James Foley off camera.

Dressed entirely in black, with a balaclava covering all but his eyes and the bridge of his nose, and a holster under his left arm, the man was nicknamed “Jihadi John”. He and other Britons in the ISIS were named after the Beatles.

‘Jihadi John’, now believed to be Emwazi, is said to be also responsible for the killings of US journalist Steven Sotloff, British aid workers David Haines and Alan Henning, and American aid worker Abdul-Rahman Kassig. He also appeared in a video with Japanese hostages Haruna Yukawa and Kenji Goto shortly before they were killed.

He used the videos to threaten the West, admonish its Arab allies and taunt President Barack Obama and British Prime Minister David Cameron. In the video, he was often seen standing next to petrified hostages cowering in orange jump suits.

Source: www.straitstimes.com

February 27, 2015
Islamic State Millitants and the Unmistakable London Accent

It is the now familiar nightmare image. A kneeling prisoner, and behind him a black-hooded man speaking to camera. The standing man denounces the West and claims that his form of Islam is under attack. He then saws off the head of the hostage. Why did Wednesday morning’s video stand out? Because this time the captive was an American journalist — James Foley — and his murderer is speaking in an unmistakable London accent.

The revulsion with which this latest Islamist atrocity has been greeted is of course understandable. But it is also surprising. This is no one-off, certainly no anomaly. Rather it is the continuation of an entirely foreseeable trend. Britain has long been a global hub of terror export, so much so that senior US government officials have suggested the next attack on US soil is likely to come from UK citizens. All countries — from Australia to Scandinavia — now have a problem with Islamic extremists. But the world could be forgiven for suspecting that Britain has become the weak link in the international fight against jihadism. And they would be right. This is not even the first beheading of an American journalist to have been arranged by a British man from London.

In 2002, 27-year-old Omar Sheikh was in Pakistan. A north London-born graduate of a private school and the London School of Economics, he had gone to fight in the Balkans and Kashmir in the 1990s. In 1994 he was arrested and jailed for his involvement in the kidnapping of three Britons and an American in India. Released in 1999 in exchange for the passengers and crew of the hijacked Air India flight IC-814, he was subsequently connected to the bombing of an American cultural centre in Calcutta in January 2002 and that same month organised the kidnapping and beheading of the Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl.

Back then it was possible to dismiss Omar Sheikh as a one-off — a macabre fluke. His alma mater shrugged off concerns about the number of London-based students who had got involved in Islamic extremism or the radical preachers touring the country. The shrug became a little harder to maintain — though maintained it was — the next year when two British men — Asif Hanif, 21, from -Hounslow in west London and Omar Khan Sharif, 27 — carried out a suicide bombing in a bar on the waterfront in Tel Aviv. Omar Sharif had been a student of King’s College London, just across the road from LSE. That time the glory of killing three Israelis and wounding over 50 was claimed by the terrorist group Hamas.

As the list of British-born jihadists grew, their activities also got closer to home. On 7 July 2005, British-born Muslims carried out the first suicide bombings on British soil, with four more attempted a fortnight later. On Christmas Day 2009, the former head of the Islamic Society at University College London attempted to explode a bomb on a plane as it landed in Detroit. Last year, two converts decapitated Drummer Lee Rigby in broad daylight in south London. It is important to keep in mind that these are just the most high-profile cases. But the list of cases which were thwarted by good security work or sheer luck is astonishing. As well as the constant stream of convictions, at least one large-scale mass atrocity attempt on the lives of the British public was thwarted each year. As were smaller attempts. Everybody still remembers the killing of Lee Rigby, but how many people recall the case of Parviz Khan’s Birmingham terrorist cell? Khan was convicted in 2008 for a plot the previous year to kidnap and behead a British Muslim soldier on video.

All the while, as the list of jihadists grew, so did the number of places where they could train. Perhaps as many as 4,000 people from Britain are thought to have gone to train or fight in Afghanistan. Estimates of the number of British citizens who have gone to fight in Syria and Iraq range from just over 500 to 1,500 (a figure from Khalid Mahmood, a Birmingham Labour MP). If the larger figure is correct, it would be significantly higher than the number of Muslims currently serving in Britain’s armed forces. Some of these jihadists have returned; some have been killed fighting. But it is now obvious that whether we like it or not, this is Britain’s problem.

Involvement in Syria spreads across Britain. As with other conflicts, a large proportion of the Brits going to fight in Syria appear to be — like the murderer of James Foley — from London. This is in line with other work, including a list of all terrorism convictions in the UK to date, which shows that almost half of Islamism-inspired terrorism offences and attacks on UK soil over the last decade were perpetrated by individuals living in London at the time of their arrest.

But involvement in the Syrian conflict has also spread to Birmingham and other places with large Muslim populations, as well as some places that will have surprised the wider public. In February of this year it transpired that the 41-year-old Abdul Waheed Majid from Crawley, West Sussex, had become a suicide bomber. On 6 February the non-Arabic-speaking Brit carried out a truck-bombing against a jail in Aleppo, Syria.

In May, the Instagram account of a British man believed to be from London shows other jihadist war crimes from Syria, including the killing of a prisoner believed to be a loyalist of President Bashar al-Assad. One of the people shooting bullets into their captive is identified as a British man who in another video berates British Muslims for not providing enough support to the jihad. ‘You know who you are,’ he says, ‘from the capital, the Midlands, up north, wherever you may be… it’s a disgrace, that brothers know where these wives are, where these families are, and yet you are buying your nephew or your child a PlayStation 4 or taking them out to Nando’s.’

The list goes on. A cell of young men from Cardiff. Others from Portsmouth. Earlier this month, Abdel-Majed Abdel Bary from west London appeared in a photo he himself posted on Twitter. He is pictured holding a severed head with the caption ‘chillin’ with my homie, or what’s left of him’. This is all part of the strange juncture that Syria has become for British jihadis — a meld of street cool, Islamic extremism and ultra-violence. Even the register in which these men communicate on social media is familiar. For instance Madhi Hassan, 19, from Portsmouth, sent out a media image of himself holding a jar of Nutella, to reassure Brits coming over that they would not lack all comforts.

Of course, one line of argument claims that if we just left all these places alone then none of this would come to us. But we left the Balkans alone and created one generation of jihadists. Then we didn’t leave Afghanistan and Iraq alone — and created another generation of jihadists. Now we have very much left Syria alone — and lo and behold, we seem to have created another jihadist generation. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t, apparently. Yet remarkably few people seem to realise that this isn’t really about us.

Nevertheless, it comes ever closer to home. In recent weeks the black flag of jihad as used by Isis has been flown openly in London — supporters of Isis have appeared on Oxford Street — and elsewhere. Just this week, the imam of a leading Welsh mosque resigned after a pro-Isis guest preacher was invited to speak at his mosque.

This battle is going on in households and mosques up and down this country. We fear joining up these dots. And we fear giving offence more than we fear the international opprobrium that is coming our way.

The country that brought liberty to much of the world is now exporting terrorism to large parts of it. Britain needs to look to itself, and address this problem, if there are not to be many more videos like this week’s.

Source: http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9293762/the-british-beheaders/

YOUTUBE: youtube.com/user/rilek1corner

FACEBOOK: facebook.com/rilek1corner

TWITTER: twitter.com/Rilek1Corner

WEBSITE: rilek1corner.com

EMAIL: [email protected]

FEEDBACK: CONTACT RILEK1CORNER

August 21, 2014
Fatimah Kumin Lim Was Found Not Guilty For Stealing Sultan of Brunei’s Ex-Wife’s Jewels

LONDON: Former Singapore national badminton player Fatimah Kumin Lim walked free from a London court this week after a jury found her not guilty of defrauding the former wife of the Sultan of Brunei of three diamond rings.

The jury believed 35-year-old Lim, who was then employed as a personal bodyguard, had been tasked by her employer Mariam Aziz to sell US$12 million worth of gems to pay off considerable gambling debts that Ms Aziz wanted to keep secret from the Brunei royal family.

Lim, a 2002 Commonwealth Games silver medallist, went to Brunei in late 2003 after being hired as a badminton coach.

She later became Ms Aziz’s assistant and bodyguard.

She was arrested last year over the case.

This is not the first legal case to arise from this matter.

In 2012, Ms Aziz brought a successful civil suit against Lim for the loss of her jewellery.

Lim was ordered to pay just over US$6 million in compensation and was told by the judge she was an unreliable witness.

In the current case, Lim was alleged to have stole three diamond rings, had the gems replaced with fakes and sold the real diamonds to pay off her own gambling debts owed to several London casinos.

After five weeks of testimony in which jurors heard a parade of witnesses testify against Lim, the jury chose to believe her version of events.

During the trial, the court heard claims of Ms Aziz’s opulent lifestyle, that she travelled with an entourage of 10 people, including a chef and a hairdresser, and visited casinos around the world, losing up to US$1 million on a daily basis.

Lim wept with relief when the jury verdict was announced.

Sources close to Lim said she is keen to return to Singapore as soon as possible.

Source: CNA

March 5, 2014