The brutal, black-clad masked killer who has been seen beheading Western victims of the Islamic State (ISIS) on video was a star salesman and valued employee of a Kuwaiti IT company, before he disappeared, later to emerge as a terrorist assassin.
Mohammed Emwazi, known as the vicious killer "Jihadi John," 21, born in Kuwait and raised in London, was "the best employee we ever had,"
his former boss told The Guardian. "He was very good with people. Calm and decent. He came to our door and gave us his CV."
Emwazi attended school in London, graduated with a computing degree from the University of Westminster in 2009 and gave those close to him no reason to suspect that he had become a radicalized terrorist,
the BBC reported.
In 2013, he disappeared, only to emerge as the infamous ISIS executioner in bloody videos of beheadings.
A former teacher of Emwazi's, Jo Shuter, once head of Quintin Kynaston Academy in northwest London, a school with two other former students who also have joined ISIS, told the BBC, "There was never any sense that any of these young men as I knew them were radicalized when they were in school.
"I can't even begin to say the shock and the horror that I feel.
"Even now when I'm listening to the news and I hear his name, I feel the skin on the back of my neck stand up because it is just so far from what I knew of him and it is so shocking and so horrendous the things that he has done."
Emwazi's former boss told The Guardian, "I have no answers for this. He wasn’t sociable. He was always earnest. He didn’t smile. But he wasn’t bad.
"We have Indian Christians working at this company who have been here for 17 years. They are treated the same as everyone. You must deal with people well. You must not use force.
"How could someone as calm and quiet as him become like the man who we saw on the news? It’s just not logical that he could be this guy."
If he had the opportunity to speak to his former salesman, he said, "I would say to him one thing, ‘Fear God, because Islam prohibits what you do.'"
Attorney General Eric Holder told
ABC News that the U.S. is "working on ways" to kill or capture "Jihadi John."
"The vow that I can make to the American people, along with our allies, is that we will hold accountable all of the people who have been responsible for these heinous, barbaric acts. That is something that we are focused on each and every day."