London, Feb 28 (IANS) The Islamic State (IS) militant known as ‘Jihadi John’ received anger management therapy in his first year of secondary school after getting into fights, a former teacher has said.
The militant, pictured in the videos of the beheadings of Western hostages, has been named as Mohammed Emwazi, a Kuwaiti-born Briton from west London.
Emwazi had attended Quintin Kynaston school in Queens Park.
The teacher said he needed help controlling his emotions and had been a “lovely, lovely boy” who had a “real willingness to try and succeed”, BBC reported Saturday.
“We’d find that he’d get very angry and worked up and it would take him a long time to calm himself down, so we did a lot of work as a school to help him with his anger and to control his emotions,” the teacher said.
“It seemed to work. He had a lot of respect for all of the work that had been done for him at our school.”
She said he did not come from a troubled background, left school with qualifications and had “every chance of doing well”.
A statement from Quintin Kynaston school said it was “shocked and sickened” that its former pupil may be involved with the IS.
Emwazi, who is in his mid-20s and was previously known to British security services, first appeared in a video last August, when he killed US journalist James Foley.
He was later thought to have been pictured in the videos of the beheadings of Haines, US journalist Steven Sotloff, British taxi driver-turned-aid worker Alan Henning, American aid worker Abdul-Rahman Kassig, also known as Peter and Japanese journalist Kenji Goto.
In each of the videos, the militant appeared dressed in a black robe with a black balaclava covering all but his eyes and the top of his nose.
Speaking with a British accent, he taunted Western powers before holding his knife to the hostages’ necks, appearing to start cutting before the film stopped.
The victims’ decapitated bodies were then shown.