German intelligence officials say a street thug rapper who became the producer of vile Isis execution videos was killed this week in Syria.

The death of Deso Dogg - real name Denis Cuspert - was first reported nearly three years ago by the Pentagon and later dismissed as false.

Now his demise on Wednesday near Deir Ezzor has been confirmed.

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Silenced: German rapper Denis Cuspert who was dubbed 'the Goebbels of ISIS' after making a string of sickening propaganda videos for the terror group has been killed in a U.S. air strike in Syria

A photo purportedly showing Cuspert's body - clad in a blue track suit - was posted on the Telegram messaging app by the pro-IS Wafa Media Foundation

Propaganda chief: Denis Cuspert (left), also known by his artist name Deso Dogg, used to rap in Berlin and was one of the most high-profile Western fighters for the Islamic State.

Cuspert is also believed to have produced the sickening footage of Jihadi John (right) beheading British and US prisoners with a knife

The German-Ghanaian was killed on Wednesday during an airstrike in the town of Gharanij in Syria's Deir Ezzor province, a statement from the pro-IS Wafa Media Foundation said. The statement was translated into English by the SITE monitoring group.

The jihadist group also posted eight graphic photographs on the Telegram messaging app that it said were of his bloody corpse, SITE said.

Cuspert joined the jihadists early in 2014, abandoning his home to become a mouthpiece in charge of IS propaganda that caused the German government to declare him a central figure at the 'highest management level' of the terror group.

He is believed to have produced the sickening footage of Jihadi John beheading British and US prisoners with a knife and it was he who arranged for the videoing and distribution of the tapes showing the beheadings of British innocents David Haines and Alan Henning.

Like Joseph Goebbels - the Nazi propaganda genius who exhorted his countrymen to fight to the death in WW2 - so Dogg had a knack for twisting words and smoothly selling the idea of Holy War to gullible Muslims in his homeland.

America claimed he had been killed in an airstrike in October 2015. But he surfaced in pictures a fortnight later.

Cuspert, who went by the Islamic moniker Abu Talha al-Almani, segued into the radical Salfist scene in Germany in 2010. A Berliner, intelligence officials say he has played a key role in luring hundreds of young Germans to fight for IS with slick videos that trash the west and promise paradise for those who fight and die in battle.

In 2015 the German government submitted a 125-page dossier on his crimes to the sanctions committee of the United Nations.

Denis Mamadou Gerhard Cuspert was born in Berlin on October 18, 1975 in Berlin's gritty Kreuzberg district to a Ghanaian father and a German mother, Sigrid, and grew up in the more middle class enclaves of Schöneberg, Charlottenburg and Moabit.

His father left the family when he was still a baby. He reportedly clashed frequently with his stepfather, a U.S. army soldier, while growing up: a violent relationship which has served to fuel his hatred of the United States.

In 2014 FBI translator Daniela Greene married Cuspert after lying to bosses about her movements and warning her new husband he was under investigation.

As a teenager he ran with gangs, skipped school and took drugs. He carried a butterfly knife and wasn't afraid to use it. Cuspert was sent to a home for difficult children, returning home after five years.

'I grew up with racism,' he later said. 'Though my mother is German, some teachers back then would call me 'Negro' and treat all Muslim kids bad.'

How the 'Goebbels of ISIS' married an FBI translator in Syria

In May last year the FBI confirmed that one of its translators based in Syria had secretly married an IS recruiter whom she had been investigating. Sources told CNN said that Daniela Greene had been untruthful to her employers about her 2014 trip. The 38-year-old served two years in prison after fleeing back to the U.S. Greene's story was ordered to be kept secret by a U.S. judge, but was revealed for the first time in May 2017 after federal court records were made public. Daniela Greene married Cuspert after lying to bosses about her movements and warning her new husband he was under investigation It transpired that Greene had in fact married Denis Cuspert, who in February 2015 had been designated a global terrorist by the U.S. government. Six months after she was first tasked with investigating him, she travelled to Turkey where she crossed the Syrian border with the help of local IS operatives, CNN reported. She was still married to a U.S. serviceman at the time. But within a month of arriving in Syria in June 2014, she rapidly began to have second thoughts about her new husband and fled the country - opting to return to the US to face her punishment. Details of her escape have not been made clear. She admitted that she had informed Cuspert he was the target of an FBI investigation, CNN reported. Greene pleaded guilty in December 2014 to making false statements in relation to international terrorism and served two years in a federal prison before her release in the summer of 2016. Her sentence was believed to be less severe because she had co-operated extensively with the authorities and recognised that she had made an egregious mistake. She is now believed to be working in a hotel at an undisclosed location. Advertisement

He said that from an early age he trained himself in Thai boxing, tae kwon do and Brazilian jiujitsu.

Social workers in Germany sent him to a special farm in Namibia that sought to rehabilitate juvenile delinquents after several spells in youth jails for violence and drug offences.

'At the age of 15, I robbed the first tourist,' he gloated. 'I met up with my eight buddies early in the evening, we had knives and guns, and we would go out robbing. There were rules: no grandmas, no women and no children.'

His first taste of nine years in jail came because he shot a gang member in the face with a gas pistol.

'What did I do wrong?' said Sigrid at her home in Berlin.

'Denis grew up quite normal, liked listening to Tina Turner tapes. I used to take him swimming and day trips at weekends to Brandenburg. He was a nice little boy...'

He enjoyed minor success in the early 2000s as a gangsta rapper, first calling himself Darkness D and later Deso Dogg. He once toured with DMX and made a couple of records but his career was increasingly interrupted with violence and crime.

After a mental breakdown in 2005 and a stay in a psychiatric clinic he stated: 'In my situation at that time nobody knew whether the next day I would be back in jail or would lie dead in the corner. If I wanted to achieve anything I had to change my life.'

Cuspert released an Islamic record in support of Osama bin Laden (above) with the words: 'You flow in our blood'

An increasingly radicalised Cuspert also expressed support for Chechen militants (above, file photo)

It was the beginnings of a religious awakening that would lead him eventually to the cauldron of Syria.

In November that year, Cuspert announced he wanted to end his music career and henceforth wanted to be known as an Islamic preacher under the name Abou Maleeq.

In an interview he said he hoped for the victory of Islamist Mujahideen in Afghanistan, Iraq, Chechnya and Somalia and described Berlin as 'a non-believer Metropolis'.

The following year he released an Islamic record praising Osama bin Laden with the words: 'You flow in our blood.'

He now came directly into the sights of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution - Germany's MI5. He was covertly tailed and found to be moving in increasingly radical circles.

In June 2012 a suicide bomber's vest made by him was discovered in a radical Islamist's flat in Berlin and he was fined £1,500 after weapons and ammo were found at his home.

He was now on a trajectory of radicalism that would lead him in a short time into the higher echelons of IS. Tattooed - Strt 8 on his right hand, Thug on his left - he swore off alcohol and preached radical Islam whenever he could.