1 Mar 2015

Mohammed Emwazi relatives ‘under watch’ in Kuwait

Channel 4 News understands that there are members of the Emwazi family in Kuwait City, including Jasem Emwazi, the father of so-called Jihadi John.

Furthermore, a source has told us that the Kuwaiti security service spoke to him last night.

According to our source the Kuwaiti investigation is focussing on whether his son – Mohammed Emwazi – had any connections with extremists when he worked in the country as a computer programmer in 2009 to 2010.

Read more: Mohammed Emwazi - from west London to wielding the IS knife

Our source also tells us that there was a meeting at the end of last year between Kuwaiti and UK security officials. The source says Mohammed Amwazi’s name was brought up by the UK officials, among numerous other subjects.

We have not yet been able to confirm these details with the Kuwaiti government.

Beddoons

Nonetheless, we know that the Emwazi family lived here in the here in the 1980s and early 1990s but interestingly, they are not Kuwaiti citizens. Instead, we understand that they are members of a stateless ethnic group called the Bedoons who originally hail from Iraq.

After the US-led Operation Desert Storm ended the Iraqi occupation in the early 1990s many Bedoons left Kuwait. There have been reports that Jasem Emwazi took his family to the UK after he lost his job as a policeman here.

It raises a question – as Bedoons, did the Emwazi family consider themselves to be outsiders in Kuwait – and once again, outsiders as new immigrants to the UK?

However, even if they did it is very difficult to know whether that would have had any effect on Mohammed Emwazi – the man universally known as ‘Jihadi John’. â??â??

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