Prosecutors and detectives have been working on building a criminal case against Mohammed Emwazi, 26, for potential offences of war crimes and multiple counts of murder, the Guardian has learned.
The the Islamic State militant dubbed “Jihadi John” has featured in seven propaganda videos claiming responsibility for the beheadings of hostages from Britain, the US and other countries.
The Crown Prosecution Service on Friday confirmed it is working with detectives from Scotland Yard’s counter-terrorism command to prosecute Emwazi over the videos and other suspected crimes if he ever comes within Britain’s jurisdiction.
A former top prosecutor said Emwazi’s crimes would be triable in British courts if committed overseas in territory seized by Isis in Syria during the civil war there.
A CPS spokesperson said: “We are liaising with the MPS [Metropolitan Police Service] Counter Terrorism Command (SO15) on their assessment of the content of videos that have been posted online that appear to show the murder of hostages.”
Lord MacDonald QC, the former director of public prosecutions, said the fact the offences took place in Syria would not prohibit a prosecution in a British court: “Since Victorian times it has been a criminal offence for British citizens to commit murder anywhere.”
He added that kidnapping offences had a universal jurisdiction and terrorism offences could be prosecuted before British jury. Torture was a war crime, as was kidnapping potentially during the course of a conflict, said MacDonald, who led the prosecution service in England and Wales from 2003 to 2008.
The senior lawyer and peer said if Emwazi denied actually killing anyone he would still face offences carrying life imprisonment: “If he was to say ‘I was just the front man’, he’d still be open to a charge of conspiracy to murder for being party to an agreement that these hostages would be killed,” MacDonald said.
SO15 has been studying the videos made and released by Isis in which the murder of hostages were depicted, accompanied by speeches from the 26-year-old former computer studies student.
S015 also houses Scotland Yard’s war crimes unit, as well as building terrorism cases through its own investigations and based on material from the intelligence services MI5 and MI6.
Emwazi became a symbol of Isis’s brutality and also a sign of their willingness to goad the west.
He appeared with all but his eyes hidden by a balaclava and dressed in black in videos showing the murders of British aid workers David Haines and Alan Henning, the American aid worker Peter Kassig and the American journalist Steven Sotloff.
Some former hostages freed after ransoms were paid have told of the Briton’s brutality, while he also played a lead role in the negotiations to free European hostages captured by Isis.
Even though the chances of Emwazi ever returning to Britain, voluntarily or after being captured, are not high, the British investigation goes beyond establishing his real identity and checking his known associates.
After Emwazi’s identity was revealed on Thursday, the family of Sotloff spoke of their hope that his killer would be put on trial, convicted in a court and jailed.
