London: Mohammed Emwazi, better known as Jihadi John, was killed following 15 months of intensive intelligence gathering by MI6, GCHQ and the CIA. While his victims suffered untold sufferings, his end came instantaneously and without warning.
For more than a year British and US intelligence agencies had been trying to gain live information on the whereabouts of the masked man whose first victim, the American journalist James Foley, was murdered in a video posted on YouTube in August 2014.
Their efforts finally paid off shortly before midnight on Thursday, when intelligence pinpointed him to a car in the centre of Raqqa, Syria, within a short walk of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant’s headquarters in the old governorate building.
Emwazi is understood to have been located by either MI6 or GCHQ, either through a human source on the ground or by monitoring his communications. The intelligence was passed on to the Pentagon, enabling the operators of an armed Predator drone already in the sky above Raqqa to spot the car in which he was travelling. Controlling their drone via a satellite link, and using a second Reaper as a “spotter” plane, they selected their target and released a Hellfire missile from 10,000 ft. Experts say the Predator may have been several miles away at the time, invisible in the night sky. Its missile arrived at such speed that Emwazi would have known nothing before it struck. At 11.51pm the car, and its four occupants, were blown to pieces.
The result was described by one US official as a “flawless” strike, a “clean hit” that would have “evaporated” Emwazi, with no collateral damage. “We are 99 per cent sure we got him,” the official said.
Emwazi’s death, if confimed, was doubly symbolic for the allied forces that hunted him down. Not only was Isil’s main propaganda tool neutralised, but the location of the strike was within sight of two of the locations most strongly identified with the terrorist group. The missile strike happened in or next to Clocktower Square, the roundabout chosen by Isil to carry out public executions.
