The ISIS executioner known as Jihadi John was paranoid and suicidal — and called himself a “dead man walking” — as British agents trailed him in 2010, e-mails show.
Mohammed Emwazi wrote to a British journalist at the time asking for help with police harassment before he fled Britain to join ISIS in Syria.
“Sometimes I feel like I’m a dead man walking,” he wrote to Mail on Sunday newspaper editor Robert Verkaik after selling a laptop and believing the buyer was an agent with Britain’s intelligence service.
“Not fearing they may kill me. Rather, fearing that one day, I’ll take as many pills as I can so that I can sleep for ever! I just want to get away from these people!” wrote Emwazi, unmasked as the knife-wielding killer in several ISIS beheading videos.
Emwazi, who went by Mohammed al-Zuhary, told Verkaik he was rattled by the laptop sale — because the buyer didn’t bother to check if the device worked and because he said, “Nice doing business with you, Mohammed,” even though Emwazi never gave his first name.
Verkaik met Emwazi in December 2010 while looking into Emwazi’s claims of harassment by police.
Emwazi was “polite,” but a story never ran because he refused to provide a photo, Verkaik recalled.
“He seemed to have a persecution complex and desperately wanted his story to be told,” Verkaik said. “His concerns seemed to border on paranoia.”
Meanwhile, Emwazi was described by former London classmates as a painfully shy teen who was bullied for his bad breath.
He would put a hand over his mouth to cover his breath, said former students of Quintin Kynaston secondary school
“He never spoke to girls unless he had to,” a teen crush Ahlam Aijot, 27, told Britain’s Sunday Mirror.
Emwazi was “obsessed” with Aijot, another schoolmate said.
“Everyone could see that he was making a fool of himself and that he was borderline stalking her,” the schoolmate said.
Others said Emwazi was never the same after he ran into a goal post and suffering a severe head injury.
An ex-schoolmate at St. Mary Magdalene Church of England primary school in London told LBC radio that Emwazi was fleeing someone who wanted to fight.
With Post Wire Services