When you are involved in beheading multiple hostages and you taunt audiences in a British accent, you are going to draw some serious heat. So much so that your days as an ISIS executioner must surely be numbered, right?

Right. It seems the man who was known as ‘Jihadi John’ has been identified and the manhunt has begun. This from Washington Post:

Mohammed Emwazi [is] a Briton from a well-to-do family who grew up in West London and graduated from college with a degree in computer programming. He is believed to have traveled to Syria around 2012 and to have later joined the Islamic State, the group whose barbarity he has come to symbolize (sic).

It turns out Emwazi has been on the radar for some time as 2011 court documents have him named as ‘a member of extremists who funneled funds, equipment and recruits from the United Kingdom to Somalia to undertake terrorism-related activity’. It makes one wonder how he could have slipped through the net then when he was suspected of extremist involvement.

A certain Asim Qureshi, who had dealings with Emwazi in 2009, said he believes police and law enforcement officers should shoulder some of the blame. The New York Times reports:

[He described] harassment by police officers at airports, pressure on Kuwait to cancel a visa and on one occasion, Mr. Emwazi being “roughed up” and “strangled by a police officer” before being sent home.

Yeah, there are more than a few people who have been roughed up by airport security my friend, there really is no need to resort to beheadings to make your point.

Meanwhile one of the widows of a man Emwazi beheaded has asked that he be caught alive, rather than affording him an ‘honourable death’. Dragana Haines, wife to murdered David Haines, had this to say to the BBC:

I hope he will be caught alive.

That’s the only moral satisfaction for the families of all the people that he murdered, because if he gets killed in the action, to put it that way, it will be an honourable death for him and that is the last thing I would actually want for someone like him.

Agreed. Let’s bring this man to justice and force him to spend his life locked in a cell watching ‘Two and a Half Men’ reruns. There can be no worse fate.

UPDATE – The Daily Mail have released the first pic of this guys – from when he was a kid.

[sources:bbc&newyorktimes&washingtonpost & dailymail]