The former headteacher of Mohammed Emwazi, the British man identified as an Islamic State killer, has insisted her school was not responsible for his radicalisation after it emerged that two other former pupils became jihadis.
Emwazi, who was known as “Jihadi John” until he was identified last week, was born in Kuwait but raised in London and attended the Quintin Kynaston academy in St John’s Wood until 2006.
Over the weekend the government ordered an investigation into the school after reports that two former pupils also went on to become Islamist fighters.
Choukri Ellekhlifi, who was two years ahead of Emwazi at the academy, was killed while fighting with terrorists in Syria in 2013. Mohammed Sakr died while fighting for al-Shabaab in Somalia.
In her first interview since Emwazi was named, Jo Shuter, who was headteacher of Quintin Kynaston academy for more than 10 years before leaving in 2013, said none of the staff were aware of problems of radicalisation with any of the three pupils.
“I’m not prepared to say when the radicalisation took place,” she told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on Monday. “All I can say is that absolutely, hand on heart, we had no knowledge of it. If we had, we would have done something about it.”
She added: “There was never any sense that these young men as I knew them were radicalised while they were at school.”
Shuter expressed her “shock and horror” at hearing that Emwazi had been identified as the jihadi in seven videos showing the killing of western hostages. “When I listen to the news and hear his name, it makes the skin on the back of my neck stand up, because it’s so far from what I knew of him.”
She said that Emwazi did not appear to be involved in gangs during his time at the school.
Shuter revealed that the school, which has a 70% Muslim roll, had identified the need to assert “citizenship and UK values over and above family values”, and devised a pledge which involved expressing “intolerance for intolerance”.
The former headteacher said that when she first encountered Emwazi as a 14-year-old in 2002 he was “quiet and reasonably hardworking” but had “adolescent issues” and had been bullied. But by the time Emwazi had reached the sixth form he was a “hardworking aspirational young man”. She said bullying problems were dealt with by the school and that while Emwazi was “not sociable”, he “was not a huge concern to us”.
Emwazi’s former boss at an Kuwaiti IT company, told the Guardian on Sunday that he was the “best employee we ever had”.
