Jihadi John's vanity was his final undoing - was exposed by his baseball cap

JIHADI John’s vanity was his final undoing, it emerged last night, after sources revealed he was identified in the hours before his death by the baseball cap he always wore.

 

Though part of a gang of four Islamic State Britons dubbed “The Beatles” by UK and US intelligence forces, the bloodthirsty butcher, real name Mohammed Emwazi, was the only British jihadi allowed to wear Western clothes in the terror group’s heartlands.

Emwazi, frequently seen in baseball hats in England, had acquired a New York Yankees cap in IS stronghold Raqqa.

 

That vital information allowed a Syrian agent planted in the town to track his movements before he was incinerated by a targeted midnight drone strike.

The end to his reign of terror came after a joint US-UK covert operation lasting several months and described by one intelligence source as the “closest the CIA and MI6 have worked together in almost 30 years”.

Operating alongside a US-led communications team, British special forces captured the voiceprint of Jihadi John as part of a wider mission to identify Islamic State leaders.

The major breakthrough came when the National Security Agency managed to monitor Emwazi’s activities online

A source revealed

 



Emwazi was the only British jihadi allowed to wear Western clothes in the terror group’s heartlands



Once the agent spotted the tell-tale baseball cap, the information was fed back to an SAS team based in a safe house on the edge of the city.

The SAS relayed the information back to the US Special Forces Command in Baghdad who gave the “kill order”.

A US Predator MQ-1 drone, flying at 22,000ft, followed the vehicle from a narrow side street into a large square before launching a Hellfire missile.

The car carrying Emwazi took a direct hit and he and three other foreign terrorists were killed instantly.

 

Ironically, the car was hit near to the city’s clock tower, the site where Islamic State beheads and crucifies opponents.

Following the attack, the SAS linked up with the agent at a secret rendezvous point before extracting him across the border into Iraq for a thorough debriefing session with MI6 and CIA agents.

 

The end to his reign of terror came after a joint US-UK covert operation lasting several months

 

Jihadi John’s vanity was his final undoing

One source revealed: “The major breakthrough came when the National Security Agency managed to monitor Emwazi’s activities online. He’s a computer programmer and he was able to cover his tracks but he left a trail.

“Before we could attack we needed an agent on the ground to get a positive identification. The SAS took the agent into Syria and they got him out again. It was incredibly dangerous but worked.”