Mohammed Emwazi’s last address of many he had in west London was in one of the poorest parts of the capital, a place scarred in the past by gang and drug problems.
Residents of the properties adjacent to his family’s two-storey home on the Mozart estate in Queen’s Park were shocked and appalled by the revelation that “Jihadi John” had lived among them in recent years, albeit only from time to time as he apparently came and went from abroad.
The Emwazis’ modest property in a block containing council flats was empty. Elisa Moraise, who lives a couple of doors down, said she had last seen a woman believed to be Mohammed Emwazi’s mother last week. She said the woman lived there with two sons and two daughters. But there was no sign of Mohammed Emwazi, whose father was reportedly a taxi driver.
“This is something scary,” said a woman who lived above the Emwazis but knew nothing of them. “It is a big shock.”
Dario Henao, a Colombian who has lived on the estate for 30 years, described the area as largely Muslim and said there was now little trouble apart from a few small gangs smoking cannabis on street corners from time to time.
“Extremism is happening and it is the reality but when you have it on your doorstep it is shocking,” he said. “What am I going to tell my children?” His daughter had just being doing a school project about Isis and extremism.
Records show Emwazi’s family moved repeatedly in west London where impoverished council blocks exist alongside gentrified rows of some of the most expensive private housing in Britain.
Until around 2003, while Emwazi was at a local secondary school, the family lived in a council house in Maida Vale where a neighbour remembered them as “a lovely family”. “My two [sons] used to play football with them and in the summer the mum would put food out for everyone,” she said.
The next two years were spent in a small flat in a bleak Westminster City council block just off Lisson Grove, where neighbours from Iran, Somalia and the UK could not recall them.
Then came another short spell in Maida Vale, at a mansion block which is now run down and occupied by many transient tenants, before settling in Queen’s Park, where residents said the worst problems of the Mozart estate – known as “crack city” in the 1990s – were behind them. “We mind our own business and it is a nice community,” said one.
“This is a total surprise to me,” said Paul Dimoldenberg, Labour councillor for Queen’s Park. “As far as I am aware, the family is just an ordinary family living in the area. The atrocities it is alleged he is responsible for are an absolute disgrace but it is nothing to do with the family or the rest of the community on the Mozart estate. I hope that the understandable press interest subsides over the coming days so that the community can get back to normal life.”