Intelligence experts hunting the unknown British jihadi and a young child shown in a new Islamic murder video will use the same identification techniques successfully used to track down Mohammed Emwazi, who was killed in a targeted US drone strike in November.
Emwazi, also known as Jihadi John, took months to be publicly identified by the security services after he appeared behind a mask in a series of series of videos showing the execution of western hostages in 2014 and 2015.
In a seemingly deliberate attempt to replicate the Emwazi videos, the new film, which purports to be a trailer for a longer Isis propaganda video, focuses on a man with a British accent before showing the apparent murder of five hostages accused of being UK spies.
The video has sparked a manhunt that will focus on the accent of the unknown militant and what can be seen of his face, compared with what is known about hundreds of suspected British extremists who have travelled to Syria and Iraq.
The unmasked young boy in the video, who also sounded English, will be easier to identify, according to Shiraz Maher, an expert on British jihadis and senior research fellow at the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation at Kings College London.
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Speaking to BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, Maher said: “The child for sure will be identified relatively quickly because it inconceivable to me, given his age, that he would have been born out there. He would have been taken over, so someone will recognise that child and tell us who he is. And of course the child isn’t wearing a balaclava or a mask.”
Maher said the use of the child in the video was unusual but not unprecedented.
He said: “The most surprising thing is the young child at the end. He does speak in English but that doesn’t necessarily mean he is from the UK. It is very hard if you watch the video to make out what he says. You have to a watch it a couple of times to be clear. We have seen French children in executions so it wouldn’t be entirely novel, but certainly in the coming weeks, when that [full] video gets released we will learn more about that.”
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http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jan/04/isis-video-uk-jihadi-voice-vein-recognition-software
