london/washington: Britain is close to identifying a suspected British national shown beheading American journalist James Foley in a video released by Islamic State militants last week, the British ambassador to the United States said yesterday.
The horrific video showing the killing of Foley last week, together with a threat to kill another American journalist being held hostage, Steven Sotloff, inspired widespread revulsion in the West and a desire to hunt down the killer.
The masked knifeman shown in the video spoke English with a London accent and security services have launched a major attempt to find out who he is by analysing the video and seeking to identify him from among the estimated 500 Britons believed to have gone to join the jihadists in Iraq and Syria.
“We are very close to identifying who this guy is,” Britain’s ambassador to the United States, Peter Westmacott told CNN’s “State of the Union” programme.
“We’re putting a lot into it,” he said, including using voice-recognition technology. Former hostages of Islamic State have suggested that the man in the video is one of a group of British Islamists assigned to guard foreign prisoners. They have been dubbed John, Paul and Ringo, of the Beatles, because of their British accents, and British media say the suspect is “jihadi John”.
The British government said it had appointed its senior defence adviser for the Middle East as a security envoy to the Iraqi Kurdistan to help Kurdish and Iraqi efforts to defeat Islamic State. Lieutenant General Sir Simon Mayall goes to Baghdad and Arbil next week. The government also said it would supply non-lethal equipment to Kurdish forces in the coming days.
Meanwhile, David Davis, the senior Conservative backbencer (a legislator who does not hold governmental office), has mocked the Home Office’s (ministry for domestic affairs) latest plans to tackle Islamist extremists in Britain and demanded far tougher penalties for people travelling abroad to fight with Islamic State.
In an article in the London-based Mail on Sunday, he said British jihadists should be treated as traitors and that they should be stripped of their citizenship — even when this might be against international law.
“Lawyers would say you cannot render someone stateless. Perhaps, perhaps not,” said Davis, a former shadow home secretary who usually criticises the government for paying too little attention to libertarian concerns.
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