DailyMail: A crack team from the SAS tracked down IS executioner Jihadi John and called in the air strike that killed him in Syria, it can be revealed today.
Until now the top-secret operation to eliminate the masked British extremist – who beheaded UK hostages Alan Henning and David Haines – was thought to have been conducted entirely from the air without any Western troops.
But The Mail on Sunday has learned that the perilous plan depended on a team of eight men from the Special Forces regiment risking their lives to penetrate deep inside the IS stronghold of Raqqa.
And the secret weapon used to identify Jihadi John was a 1lb helicopter drone launched by the soldiers. The daring mission began in darkness on November 11 when two US Chinook helicopters skimmed low across the Syrian desert to land at an isolated spot.
Avoiding all roads, the team of soldiers drove in desert buggies 35 miles south towards Raqqa. At about 3am, they ‘dug in’ five miles outside the city, where they remained undetected.
The following evening, while the rest of the team were on lookout, one man assembled four 3ft nano-helicopters with infrared and night-vision cameras in the nose. They were pre-programmed to fly to Jihadi John’s hideout – a six-storey building in Raqqa.
The first drone set off towards its target, then entered ‘hover and stare’ mode, recording the movements of IS suspects at a building near the Sharksa mosque.
It beamed footage by satellite back to SAS HQ in Hereford and the US Central Command in Doha, Qatar.
At 8.30pm, with the first drone low on power, a second one took over, and after another fruitless wait, it was replaced at 10pm.
But when the third suddenly shot back images of Jihadi John – real name Mohammed Emwazi – the tension in the control rooms was palpable.
A source said: ‘US commanders re-tasked a Reaper drone armed with Hellfire missiles. At 11.40 a car pulled up and he got inside. The Reaper locked on to its target and Jihadi John was history. The guys were chuffed to get that maniac.’
£9million Tornados protected… by a 5ft fence
The Mail on Sunday can today reveal glaring security lapses at an RAF base where Tornado strike jets are protected by a flimsy 5ft-high picket fence.
Two Tornado GR4 fighter-bombers took off from RAF Marham in Norfolk last week to join the fight against Islamic State in Syria.
But the wooden fence at the end of the base’s runway appears shockingly inadequate and could easily be knocked down by a would-be terrorist.
Although a hedge grows along most of the quarter-mile section of fence on the north-east corner of the base, reporter Andrew Young discovered an 8ft-wide gap, allowing him to go straight up to the fence.
The spot is just 300 yards from a path on which the bombers, which each cost £9.4 million, taxi down before they take off on the main runway.
The reporter, carrying a large rucksack which could potentially have hidden a bomb or weapons, stood by the fence for more than an hour on Wednesday as five of the jets took off on training missions.
At no time was he challenged by personnel at the base.
An RAF spokesman said last night: ‘As a matter of policy, neither the RAF nor the Ministry of Defence discuss security measures. However, we can confirm security measures in place are robust and multi-layered, and are not solely dependent on perimeter fencing.’
