Mr Henning’s nephew Stuart said: “Mixed feelings today — wanted the coward behind the mask to suffer the way Alan and his friends did but also glad he’s been destroyed.” Louise Woodward-Styles, a friend of the murdered aid worker, said it would be hard for the family to “get closure”.
“His body wasn’t returned home and it was something they had to deal with privately,” she added. “For them to say that Jihadi John has been killed doesn’t mean anything. Alan has gone and nothing will bring him back.” She said she would have preferred Emwazi to be “brought back to face justice”.
Diane Foley, mother of US journalist James, told ABC News that Emwazi’s death would be “really a small solace to us”. She lamented “this huge effort to go after this deranged man filled with hate when they can’t make half that effort to save the hostages while these young Americans were still alive.”
Mr Sotloff’s mother Shirley told NBC: “If they got him great, but it doesn’t bring my son back. I don’t think there will ever be closure.”
The mother of a former classmate of Emwazi said her daughter would not be “shedding any tears” over his death. Ahlam Ajjott, 27, from Wembley, was in the same maths and English classes as Emwazi at Quintin Kynaston school in St John’s Wood when they were 16.
Classmates said he had become “obsessed” with her and was “borderline stalking her”, although she had been unaware of it. Today her mother Souria said: “She will not be shedding any tears. She has a family and wants to put all this behind her. You could say if you play with fire you get burned.”
Other friends of the Emwazi family expressed sadness for the killer’s relatives. One said: “I feel sorry for his dad. He was a taxi driver like me and they are a nice family from all that I saw.”
Another, Elisa Moraise, 45, added: “If he is dead I feel sorry for the family. It’s hard to believe what has happened.”
Emwazi’s father Jasem, 52, is understood to have disowned his son, calling him “a dog, an animal and a terrorist”.
Mr Emwazi reportedly told a colleague he was “ashamed” and told his son in 2013: “I hope you die.”
A Kuwaiti cousin said in March: “We hate him. We hope he will be killed soon. This will be good news for our family.”
