'Jihadi John' said to have become drunk and abusive onboard flight from Amsterdam to Tanzania, and was subsequently denied entry
Mohammed Emwazi, the British extremist accused of beheading foreign hostages in Syria, was expelled from Tanzania for being drunk and abusive, it has emerged.
The supposed strict Muslim had reportedly engaged in a 10-hour drinking session onboard a flight from Amsterdam to the east African city of Dar es Salaam, where he was denied entry, according to a report in The Times.
Emwazi was detained upon arrival in May 2009 for “drunkenness”, alongside companions Ali Adorus, 27, from east London, who has since been jailed in Ethiopia for terrorism offences, and a German national named as 23-year-old Marcel Schrodl.
Contradicting previous reports that they had been tipped off by MI5, Mathias Chikawe, Tanzania’s home affairs minister, said that it was the pilot of the KLM flight on which Emwazi was travelling that warned immigration staff that the trio were trouble.
All three were held in police cells overnight and put on the first flight back to the Netherlands.
“They were refused entry because they disembarked from the plane very drunk,” Mr Chikawe told Jerome Starkey of The Times.
“They were insulting our immigration staff and other people. They failed to explain why they had come to Tanzania.”
Upon his return, Emwazi, 26, complained to the UK-based campaign group Cage about the treatment he received in Tanzania, telling them he was beaten and abused by officials whom he claims said were acting on foreign government orders.
He told Cage that he had travelled to Tanzania for a safari. However it is believed he had been attempting to travel across to Kenya and on to Somalia in order to train with the Islamist group al-Shabaab.
Emwazi eventually travel to Syria in early 2013, where he joined the al-Qaeda-aligned group Jabhat al-Nusra before switching allegiances to the islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, Isil.
He has appeared, masked, in slickly-produced videos as the killer of several Western hostages, including British aid workers Alan Henning and David Haines, as well as American journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff.
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