New York sources have stated that after announcing Siddhartha Dhar's designation as a global terrorist on Tuesday, the State Department said that Dhar “is believed to be the masked leader who appeared in a January 2016 the IS video of the execution of several prisoners” who were accused by it of spying for Britain. Meanwhile he replaced the feared IS executioner known as “Jihadi John”, who appeared in several videos beheading his victims.
Accordingly his name was Mohammad Emwazi and he had also lived in Britain. He was killed in 2015 in a US-British drone strike while in the Syrian city of Raqqa then under the IS control. Meanwhile Dhar posed a terrorist threat to US citizens and interests and any property he may have in the US are frozen and Americans banned in dealing with them.
Moreover before leaving for Syria to join the IS in
2014, Dhar had been a member of a British terrorist organisation,
Al-Muhajiroun. Further according to the department a Muslim convert who adopted
the name Abu Rumaysah al-Britani, he advocated global jihad not from the
deserts of Syria but on UK TV.
