FACE OF A KILLER
Jihadi John was blown up by US drones in worldwide manhunt after his walk and angle of his BEARD gave him away
BRUTAL ISIS terrorist Jihadi John was tracked down and blown up by US drones after his walk and the angle of his BEARD gave him away.
The bloodthirsty was part of a group of four British jihadis nicknamed The Beatles - who appeared in sick videos beheading western hostages, including two Brits - and tracked down in a huge international manhunt.
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Jihadi John, whose real name was Mohammed Emwazi, was tracked down and killed by a US drone strike in November 2015 in Raqqa, in Syria.
A new Channel 4 documentary reveals for the first time new details of the operation - showing the thug unmasked as he fights for ISIS.
The monster always appeared masked in the videos in which he was filmed beheading various western hostages including two Brits, David Haines and Alan Henning.
But the documentary has shown pictures of the terrorist, who grew up in London, with a long bushy beard and wielding a Kalashnikov.
It also tells of how he was hunted down with the help of state-of-the-art tracking and identification technology.
Drones had been searching for him for a year but he always surrounded himself with women and children and made sure he was in crowded areas.
That made avoiding civilian casualties in any attempt to kill him difficult but an opportunity emerged when he was walking alone on a street while on the phone.
A senior US military officer said his distinctive beard made him recognisable.
Colonel Steve Warren, the Pentagon spokesman at the time, told the programme: “Because of the conditions — it was night — we were using infrared.
DISTINCTIVE BEARD
“You can't see his face but we could sort of see how he moved, the cut of his jib, so to speak. The angle of his beard, these things we could see.
“Eventually we were convinced that this is Jihadi John. And so the floor commander at the time orders, 'Take the shot.' Within 15 seconds a missile obliterated Emwazi.”
Emwazi first appeared in August 2014 when he killed American journalist James Foley.
Steven Sotloff and the American aid worker Peter Kassig were all murdered by the Beatles cell, who also posted videos of their gruesome deaths.
Emwazi made strenuous efforts to avoid detection including using encryption programmes and wiping every computer he used to send messages.
Within hours of the first video, officials at the British signals intelligence agency GCHQ used voice recognition technology to established his identity.
GCHQ used voice recordings from previous wire taps taken during a three-year surveillance operation and compared it to the disguised voice used in the ISIS video.
They also compared the pattern of the veins in his left hand, in which held a knife pointed directly towards the camera, with archive images of him.
Robert Hannigan, a former director of GCHQ, told the : "We had a race to find out who he was his size, his hands, but, above all, his voice, made identifying him quite easy.”
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The last two remaining members of the "The Beatles" gang, Alexanda Kotey and El Shafee Elsheik, were captured in Syria last year.
Aine Davis – who left the UK in 2013 to fight in Syria – is thought to have been the fourth member of the group.
He was jailed for seven-and-a-half years in Turkey last year after being found guilty of being a member of a terrorist organisation.
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