IS executioner 'Jihadi John' named as London graduate

LONDON: "Jihadi John", the masked IS militant believed responsible for beheading of at least five Western hostages, has been named as Kuwaiti-born computing graduate Mohammed Emwazi from London.

"Jihadi John", nicknamed after Beatle John Lennon due to his British accent, is believed to be responsible for the murders of US journalists James Foley and 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.

Families of the murdered hostages said they looked forward to seeing Emwazi brought to justice.

In the videos posted online, he appears dressed all in black with only his eyes exposed, brandishing a knife while launching tirades against the West.

A Washington Post report citing friends, a leading think-tank researching foreign jihadists and a British security official quoted by the New York Times identified Emwazi as the executioner.

However London´s Metropolitan Police dismissed the reports as "speculation" and said it was "not going to confirm his identity" to protect human lives while the US National Security Council said it would neither confirm nor deny the reports.

The International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation at King´s College in London said it believed the identity "to be accurate and correct".

"We´re pretty confident that the right individual has been named," Shiraz Maher, a senior research fellow at the centre, told AFP.

He believed the leak had come from the United States and pointed out that "there are no further Americans being held hostage by Islamic State".

"I think the US chose to put this out," he said.