Merciless killer Jihadi John was 'never the same' after suffering a serious head injury when he ran into a goal post as a child, a former classmate has claimed.

The executioner - this week unmasked as Londoner Mohammed Emwazi - agreed with Hitler's massacre of Jews and called them 'f***king pigs', another has revealed.

While some former peers say they are struggling to believe the quiet boy they knew turned into one of the world's most notorious killers, others have spoken of a boy with extreme beliefs and a thirst for blood.

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Classmates: Emwazi (front row, second from left) pictured with classmates at St Mary Magdalene Church of England primary school in west London where he suffered a head injury

The executioner - this week unmasked as Londoner Mohammed Emwazi - was a supporter of Hitler and called Jews 'f***king pigs', it's been revealed

The Islamic State killer was born in Kuwait before moving to Britain at six years old. He appeared to embrace British life - playing football in the affluent streets of West London while supporting Manchester United.

But a former classmate at St Mary Magdalene Church of England primary school in Maida Vale, West London, told LBC: 'We were in the playground and Mohammed was running away from someone, I think he was just about to get into a fight.

'And as he was running, another guy blocked his path. And he ran into a goal post and hit his head on a metal goal post and fell to the floor.

'This was Year 6 - we didn't see him for six weeks. He was not the same ever since that brain injury. I am telling you one million per cent. He was not the same'.

A former friend of the terrorist, who met him in 1999 when they both attended Quintin Kynaston Community Academy in St John's Wood, North London, said he found out Emwazi was a Nazi sympathiser during a Year 9 lesson.

The 27-year-old told the Daily Mirror: 'The teacher told us the Nazis drew up plans to get rid of all the Jews.

I am telling you one million per cent. He was not the same Former classmate

'I heard Mohammed mutter "Good, they deserved it". I thought he was joking but later he told me that he hated all Jews and blamed them for the plight of Muslims.'

The school friend said that if they ever walked past a house in Golders Green that Emwazi knew was owned by a Jew, he would shout obscenities such as 'f***king pigs'.

The former peer said Emwazi hated former U.S. President George Bush and Tony Blai, and wanted to kill them.

One of the executioner's secondary school teachers told BBC's Newsnight that Emwazi had received anger therapy to help him control his emotions.

And worryingly, in a school yearbook from when he was 10, Emwazi lists his favourite computer game as shooting game "Duke Nukem: Time To Kill" and his favourite book as "How To Kill A Monster" from the popular children's Goosebumps series.

But still, his role as Islamic State’s sadistic butcher was a far cry from the football-mad schoolboy who moved to Britain from Kuwait with his parents in 1993.

Unmasked: ISIS executioner 'Jihadi John', pictured here with American journalist Steven Sotloff, has been identified as Mohammed Emwazi from London. Sotloff's family have called for him to be caught and tried

Given a council flat overlooking the Regents Canal in the exclusive Little Venice area of West London, his father found work as a minicab and delivery van driver while his mother stayed at home with Mohammed and his two younger sisters, now 25 and 23.

Three more children followed, all born after the family settled in Britain, and the family were said to be close, with both parents arriving at the school gate each day to collect their children.

EMWAZI RECEIVED ANGER THERAPY A former secondary school teacher of the 26-year-old, who she described as a 'success story' for appearing to overcome an anger problem to achieve good grades, said staff at Quintin Kynaston Community Academy (QK), were quizzed by MI5 on Thursday. The teacher, who remained anonymous, told BBC's Newsnight that Emwazi had received anger therapy to help him control his emotions. She said: 'I'd say that Mohammed was a success story of our school, he went on to achieve everything that he wanted to do; he went to a university of his choice, and from the way he started in Year 7 to how he blossomed 'til he left at the end of Sixth Form was a huge achievement for him, so I'm very surprised.' An official statement from the school, released by Westminster Council yesterday, said it was 'shocked and sickened' that the former pupil was involved in terrorism. 'If the allegations are true we are all extremely shocked and sickened by the news. 'All members of staff at QK work very hard to support the education and well-being of our students and protect them from harm. Advertisement

His family are not being named to protect their privacy.

After finishing primary school in 1999, young Mohammed moved to Quintin Kynaston Community Academy, in St John’s Wood, where he is believed to have studied alongside former X Factor judge and pop star Tulisa Contostavlos.

Once there, he became more observant of his religion and began wearing more traditional Islamic dress, and his sisters began to wear the hijab.

It was only after he won a place studying computing at the University of Westminster that his behaviour began to change.

He began attending different mosques and was known to associate with Bilal el-Berjawi, who was killed by a drone strike in Somalia three years ago.

In August 2009, after his graduation, Emwazi flew to Tanzania in East Africa with friends and told authorities they were going on a wildlife safari.

But the group was refused entry and put on a plane to the Netherlands, where Emwazi later claimed he was questioned by an MI5 agent called Nick.

The British officer accused him of planning to travel to Somalia to join the militant group Al Shabaab, he said, and said MI5 had been watching him.

Emwazi denied the accusation – bragging that he would not take a designer Rocawear sweater in his luggage if he was planning to join Somalian rebels.

The Islamic Society at the University of Westminster has long been associated with extremist views, with one former student saying he walked in on members celebrating 9/11

In emails to the campaign group Cage, Emwazi said: ‘He [Nick] knew everything about me; where I lived, what I did, the people I hanged around with.’

Nick then tried to recruit the 21-year-old, Emwazi claimed, and threatened him when he refused to cooperate.

Emwazi said the officer told him: ‘You’re going to have a lot of trouble…You’re going to be known…You’re going to be followed…Life will be harder for you.’

On his return to Britain, Emwazi said his family told him they had been ‘visited’, and he claimed a woman he had been planning to marry broke off their engagement because her family had also been contacted and were scared.

According to Emwazi, his family then began planning for him to travel to Kuwait to get him away from the ‘harassment’ he had suffered in Britain and he went to work for a computer programming company in the emirate.

In his account to Cage, he said security officers continued to visit his family and he decided to make a ‘new life’ in Kuwait, where he was once again planning to marry.

But following a visit back to Britain in 2010, he said he was stopped at Heathrow Airport and barred from flying back to Kuwait, and claimed that he was interrogated by an aggressive officer who threw him against a wall, grabbed his beard and strangled him.

Emwazi made an official complaint to the Independent Police Complaints Commission, saying he had been assaulted by the officer.

Home: Minicab driver's son Emwazi most recently lived at a flat in Queen's Park in west London

Incensed by the decision to stop him returning to Kuwait, Emwazi told Cage he felt ‘like a prisoner’ in London.

Friends told the Washington Post he was already talking wildly about travelling to Syria, where the uprising against Bashar al Assad was beginning in earnest.

But he also applied for work in Saudi Arabia, taking a course to teach English and applying for work at language centres in the kingdom.

Rejected by those, his father suggested he change his name in a bid to avoid any block from British authorities, and Cage said he changed his name by deed poll in 2013 to become Mohammed al-Ayan.

He made one more attempt to fly back to Kuwait that year but was barred from leaving Britain again and disappeared from his parents’ home a week later.

His parents reported him missing after three days but claimed it was four months before police arrived at their home and said they had information he was in Syria.

A source who claimed to have met Emwazi in Syria told Channel 4 News that he was a member of one of the earliest groups from London who travelled to fight for the establishment of an Islamic caliphate.

He is believed to have been one of more than 700 foreign fighters in the Katiba al-Muhajireen (The Migrants Brigade) who arrived in the Middle East three years ago.

The family are asking to be given new identities after leaving their home in Maida Vale, west London (pictured), after their son was unmasked as killer Jihadi John

Yesterday, it was revealed that terrified relatives of Emwazi want to change their identities over fears of revenge attacks.

The jihadi’s parents have gone into hiding and are ‘living in fear’ that they and their children could be targeted by those demanding revenge.

Friends spoke out to defend the family – said to be moderate Muslims who had never supported extremism.

They fled their home before he was revealed to be the terrorist killer and have not been seen since.

A close friend said: ‘I spoke to his sister and she is devastated. They are having to move, to change their identities. They are going through a very hard time.

‘This [revealing Emwazi’s identity] puts them at risk – they could be attacked by racists – and they have done nothing wrong. It’s not fair.

‘They are a good innocent family. This is not their fault, this [extremism] is not something the family would support in any way.

'But this is London – you can’t control what your kid does when they are an adult and go out and do their own thing.’

Asim Qureshi, the research director of Cage, was filmed at a rally at the height of the Iraq war calling on protesters to 'support the Jihad of our brothers and sisters' in the Middle East

Last night, charities were urged to stop funding ‘warped’ human rights group Cage. Politicians said it had acted reprehensibly in describing him as a ‘beautiful young man’.

The group, led by former Guantanamo Bay inmate Moazzam Begg, has been propped up largely by grants of £305,000 from the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust.

Another charity, set up in memory of Body Shop tycoon Anita Roddick, has handed over £120,000 to Cage. Much of the rest of the group’s income comes from cash donations from Muslims.

Lord Carlile, a former independent reviewer of anti-terror legislation, said he had serious concerns about Cage and would never advise giving it money.

‘Cage is an organisation with a warped view,’ he said. ‘No sensible person should be funding it.’

Last night the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust defended its decision to fund Cage, saying it believed the group asked ‘legitimate questions about security service contact with those who have gone on to commit horrific acts of violence’.

Nauseating! An odious press conference, apologists for terror and the do-gooders who fund them

By Richard Pendlebury and Stephen Wright

Held at an ‘art gallery’ near London’s Euston station, it was one of the most extraordinary and nauseating press conferences of recent times.

It had been convened at 3pm on Thursday by the ‘human rights’ organisation Cage following the identification of masked killer Jihadi John as the Kuwaiti-born Londoner Mohammed Emwazi.

For three years, the campaign group had been in close contact with and offered support to Emwazi before he left Britain to fight in Syria in 2012.

For three years Cage had been in contact with and supported Mohammed Emwazi before he escaped to Syria, but rather than offer an apology or regret at a press conference yesterday, they defended him

But rather than express an apology – or even a smidgen of regret – for having failed to turn him away from the path to barbarism, what we witnessed was almost an hour of excuses, accusation and invective against Britain, British society and the British state.

Broadcast live for 52 minutes on the BBC and 58 on Sky News, the men from Cage described Jihadi John as an ‘extremely kind’ and ‘beautiful young man’.

The lachrymose assessment of his character was made by the organisation’s ‘research director’ Asim Qureshi, who spoke uninterrupted for 18 minutes about the iniquities of British policy on the ‘war on terror’ and the unfair ‘harassment’ that men such as Jihadi John experience.

The heavily-bearded Qureshi is a very middle-class radical, who lives with his partner in a £500,000 house in suburban Surrey.

Despite these trappings of infidel decadence, he has advocated jihad and the creation of an 8th-century-style Islamic Caliphate in Britain, similar to that which has been imposed in Syria and Iraq by the terror group IS.

In 2006, Qureshi was filmed outside the US embassy in London addressing a rally organised by the extremist group Hizb ut-Tahrir.

He said: ‘When we see the example of our brothers and sisters fighting in Chechnya, Iraq, Palestine, Kashmir, Afghanistan, then we know where the example lies.

'We know that it is incumbent upon all of us, to support the jihad of our brothers and sisters in these countries when they are facing the oppression of the West. Allahu akbar! Allahu akbar!’

In a subsequent interview with the pro-Putin broadcaster Russia Today, Qureshi supported the imposition of Sharia law, including the stoning to death of adulterers and other brutal capital punishments.

Cage's research director Asim Qureshi lives in a £500,000 house in Surrey with his wife, but once took part in a demonstration calling for Jihad

This week, his opening harangue at the press conference was followed by Cage’s ‘media officer’ Cerie Bullivant, a British convert to Islam.

He railed for another eight minutes about the treatment he had received at the hands of the security services ‘in very similar circumstances’ to those of Emwazi.

Bullivant, a 32-year-old former mental health nurse once married to a Kuwaiti-born woman, went on the run for two months in 2006 after being placed under a control order when it was suspected he was planning to go to Iraq to fight for insurgents.

He was later cleared of breaching the condition by a jury which accepted he had a ‘reasonable excuse’ for flouting the order because it was making his life miserable.

The civil rights organisation Liberty was sufficiently ‘impressed’ by his subsequent campaigning to award him a ‘human rights young person of the year’ award in 2011.

The third member and ‘moderator’ of the press conference panel was John Rees, a former leading activist of the Socialist Workers’ Party.

His position is a good example of how the hard-Left has aligned itself with radical Islam.

Rees is national officer of the Stop the War Coalition and presenter on the Islam Channel, through which he fostered close links with Cage.

The group first appeared in 2003, when it was known as CagePrisoners. It was founded to oppose official Western policy on the ‘war on terror’ and to stand up for Muslims who were arrested, captured or killed in security operations.

Critics say it was – as we witnessed on Thursday – a sophisticated organisation that knows how to exploit a democratic system which enshrines free speech and human rights in order to support terrorists.

This is not a view, though, taken by two of Britain’s largest left-of-centre charitable foundations, which saw CagePrisoners as a human rights cause worth supporting and donating hundreds of thousands of pounds to.

Some £120,000 was given by the Anita Roddick Foundation, which is run by the late Body Shop owner’s husband and their children.

Funds from her estimated £100million estate have been given to a range of bodies that ‘want to change the world’. This definition would seem to include an organisation that wants Britain to become a medieval caliphate.

A further £305,000 was given to CagePrisoners/Cage over a period of six years by the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust, a Quaker-run fund set up by the York-based chocolate maker and philanthropist.

Quite why the trustees support such a body is a question for their consciences. Probably, it is also a question for the Charity Commission to look into.

Sources at the Commission believe officials at the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust may have been ‘duped’ when they agreed to make donations to Cage. One said: ‘They were conned after it re-branded itself as a human rights group.’

He said Cage (and its previous entity CagePrisoners) had been well-known to the security services for some years because of its support for terrorists.

Cage has also worked closely with two other UK-based organisations that have reported ties to Islamic extremists – the Cordoba Foundation and the Emirates Centre for Human Rights (ECHR).

Moazzam Begg, a former Guantanamo Bay detainee, joined Cage in 2006 as 'outreach director' and began campaigning for the release of Al-Qaeda cheerleader Anwar al-Awlaki

Cage came to wider attention in 2006 when Birmingham-born Moazzam Begg joined it as ‘outreach director’. He had been arrested in Pakistan in 2002 and spent three years at Guantanamo Bay where he claimed to have been interrogated 300 times.

He admitted having visited terror training camps in Afghanistan but was awarded £1million compensation by the British Government.

After his release without charge, he has since become a columnist for the Guardian.

Through Begg, Cage developed links with the radical preacher and Al Qaeda cheerleader Anwar al-Awlaki and campaigned for his release from detention in Yemen.

He was later killed in an American drone strike. In 2010, Begg also spoke of his desire for a Caliphate-style regime in Britain.

As for Cage, it is a mystery why it has escaped scrutiny for so long. Significantly in 2010, a director of the campaign group Amnesty International was suspended by the organisation for talking out of turn.

Gita Sahgal had criticised its close ties with Cage – which she described as ‘jihadis’ – and with Begg, who she called ‘Britain’s most famous supporter of the Taliban’.

A sophisticated organisation that knows how to exploit a free speech and human rights to support terrorists

Last year Begg was arrested over alleged links to terrorism training and funding in Syria, to which he had previously travelled.

As a result, Cage’s bank accounts were frozen after intervention from the Treasury.

Although the charges against Begg were later dropped, it seems from the organisation’s website that its accounts are still frozen.

In the meantime, Cage asks for donors to send money online to a website more often used for receiving charitable sponsorship – or to send cash by recorded delivery to an address in Bloomsbury, central London.

It also advises: ‘We can arrange for someone to pick up the cash donation from you.’

Cage continues to have a phlegmatic view of British jihadis fighting in Syria.

One article posted on its website last year was headed ‘British fighters in Syria should not concern us’, which undoubtedly could be seen as encouraging or justifying terrorism.

Indeed, the ‘human rights’ outfit described the first British suicide bomber in Syria, Abdul Waheed Majid, from Crawley, as ‘giving his life for a just cause, and it would be shameful of us were we to tarnish him and other Syrian fighters as terrorists for doing that’.

Omar Deghayes, a Libyan citizen who was a detainee at Guantanamo Bay, has also been listed as a director of Cage.

Two of his nephews were killed after travelling from their Sussex homes to fight in Syria. For their part, British security services fear the rise of an Islamic State terrorist threat in Britain is helped by the sympathetic campaigning of ‘human rights’ groups such as Cage.