Cameron dismissed the video as “desperate stuff” from an “appalling” terror group that is “losing ground”.
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Prime Minister David Cameron has described the video as “desperate stuff” created to deflect from recent losses by IS.
According to reports in the BBC, Independent, Reuters and Telegraph, a British-Indian man by the name of Siddhartha Dhar is the key suspect in intelligence agency efforts to identify the masked, gun-wielding English-speaker featured in the Islamic State video posted Sunday threatening to invade and impose Shariah law in Britain.
The man in the 10-minute video doesn’t appear to be the British terrorist known as Jihadi John, and seems to add more evidence that Jihadi John was killed in November in a US drone strike on the Syrian town of Raqqa.
He doesn’t like it over there.
In the video, Islamic State militants appeared to execute five men accused of being British spies by shooting them point blank in the back of the head. He doesn’t know anything. “They are just using him as a shield”, the 59-year-old told The Sun newspaper. Britain’s Foreign Office issued a short statement saying: “We are aware of the video and are examining the content”. The boy was identified as the son of Londoner Grace Dare, who converted to Islam and married an Islamic State fighter in Syria.
Helen Bowers, spokeswoman for Prime Minister David Cameron, said an initial assessment has been completed but that officials will not comment on the identities of the people involved “at any stage of the process”.
British media speculated that the militant might be Siddhartha Dhar, who is also known as Abu Rumaysah, a convert from Hinduism and a high-profile Islamist, although security experts were divided on whether it was him.
Dhar, a father of four, fled Britain in 2014 while out on bail after being arrested on suspicion of encouraging terrorism.
“A lot of people think it is him”, a source said to BBC, although there has been no official confirmation.
Video: Who Are The Five IS Victims?
“They have no courage to confront the West, they have no capability to confront the West”, Dr Ashraf said.
Dhar’s sister publicly vowed to “kill him myself” if it turned out he has taken the place of Jihadi John as an ISIS executioner.
“How unusual it is that a leader of a small island threatens us with a handful of planes”, the man says, mocking British military efforts to eliminate the extremist group in Iraq and Syria.
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However, the militant who speaks to the camera sounds British and hurls similar jibes: He calls Cameron an “imbecile”, critiques the Western campaign against ISIS and warns one day Britain will be defeated by the militants.
