‘Jihadi John’ kin said under watch in Kuwait

Kuwaiti authorities are closely monitoring several relatives of “Jihadi John” who live and work in the Gulf emirate where the Islamic State executioner was born, press reports say.

A number of relatives of Mohammed Emwazi, named as the man who has beheaded at least five Western hostages, are working in Kuwait and, like him, hold British citizenship, Al-Qabas newspaper reports.

“Security agencies have taken the necessary measures to monitor them round the clock,” the paper says, citing an “informed source.”

The daily did not say how many of Emwazi’s relatives are in Kuwait. Authorities have remained silent on the issue.

Al-Rai newspaper cites security sources as saying that Emwazi’s father, Jassem Abdulkareem, also a British national, is currently in Kuwait and is expected to be summoned by authorities.

Emwazi visited Kuwait several times, the last of them between January 18 and April 26, 2010, Al-Qabas says.

He arrived from the United Arab Emirates using his British passport to obtain a Kuwaiti entry visa.

A year later, he was denied entry to Kuwait after his name came up during investigations into attacks in Britain, the newspaper says.

Emwazi’s visits to Kuwait were largely of a social nature and he was briefly engaged to a stateless Kuwaiti resident, the paper adds.

Emwazi was born in Kuwait but moved to London in the early 1990s when he was a child, and attended school and university in the British capital.

The Daily Telegraph reports that he went to school with two other boys who went on to become jihadis — Choukri Ellekhlifi, who was killed fighting in Syria, and Mohammed Sakr, killed fighting in Somalia.

It was also reported that Emwazi had contacts with the men responsible for failed attacks on London’s public transport system in 2005, two weeks after suicide bombings killed 52 people in the British capital.

— AFP