Former British rapper identified as killer of US journalist

LONDON — British intelligence agencies have identified a 24-year-old former rapper as the Islamic State militant who beheaded American journalist James Foley, media reports said yesterday.

MI5 and MI6 believe the alleged killer is Abdel-Majed Abdel Bary, who was reported to have left his home in an affluent west London suburb last year to join the civil war in Syria.

Mr Foley’s killer, who appeared in a grisly video released last week showing the beheading, was previously reported to be the leader of a group of British militants, dubbed the Beatles, who specialise in hostage-taking in Syria.

Abdel-Majed, who was also known as L Jinny or Lyricist Jinn, had his music played on radio station BBC Radio 1. He also made a number of music videos for his songs, with titles such as Flying High, Dreamer and Overdose.

The rapper-turned-jihadist had earlier this month tweeted a photo of himself holding a severed head, believed to have been taken in the Islamic State stronghold of Raqqa in Syria. The gruesome picture was captioned “Chillin’ with my homie or what’s left of him”, The Independent reported.

Abdel-Majed’s Egyptian-born father is awaiting trial in Manhattan on terror charges relating to the bombings of United States embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, media reports said.

Abdel-Majed had walked out of his London home last year, saying he was “leaving everything for the sake of Allah”, The New York Post reported.

On Saturday night, The Daily Telegraph quoted a security source as saying: “We are considering all evidence from the Internet to establish who killed James Foley. We can’t afford to rule anything out but ... nothing can be taken at face value.”

In the hunt for Mr Foley’s killer, security services have reportedly “significantly narrowed” the field of suspects, though a definitive identification has not yet been made.

The killer has been dubbed Jihadi John because he reportedly calls himself John, a testimony from a hostage released by Islamic State kidnappers showed. AGENCIES