The government has been urged to revoke citizenship of British jihadists after it emerged intelligence services have identified the suspected British killer of James Foley.
New laws, dubbed asbos for terrorists, have been dismissed by former shadow home secretary David Davis who said they must instead be banned from returning to the UK.
Home secretary Theresa May is poised to bring in new laws to tackle British extremists in the wake of the horrific killing of US journalist James Foley by a jihadist with an English accent.
But Davis said the Government’s response to the crisis in Iraq had been ‘tentative, uncertain, almost limp” and suggested the men heading overseas to fight were committing treason.
In an article for the Mail on Sunday, Davis wrote: “Asbos for terrorists? It is hard to imagine the ISIS killers quaking in their boots.”
He added: “Since these young men are in effect swearing allegiance to a hostile state, they should all forfeit their British citizenship - not just those who are dual nationals.
“Since this is an incredibly serious penalty, it should be done only after a proper public trial carrying all the public seriousness and opprobrium of a murder trial, because in many cases that is what it would be.
“As the home secretary reiterated yesterday, lawyers would say you cannot render someone stateless. Perhaps, perhaps not. Whitehall lawyers have been wrong before. Democracies have a right to defend themselves.
“IS is claiming to be a state. They can issue these young men with Islamic State passports if they so wish. It is not our problem that they would have trouble getting into any civilised country with them.”
Meanwhile, MI5 and MI6 have worked out the identity of Foley’s killer, known as “Jihadi John”, but none of the details have been disclosed, The Sunday Times reported.
Britain’s foreign secretary Philip Hammond said yesterday that the killing of US journalist James Foley by a man speaking with an English accent was an “utter betrayal of our country”.
The Sunday Times newspaper, citing unnamed senior government sources, reported that intelligence services MI5 and MI6 have identified the fighter suspected of killing Foley but the sources did not divulge the suspect’s name.
“It is horrifying to think that the perpetrator of this heinous act could have been brought up in Britain,” Hammond wrote in an article for the paper.
“It is an utter betrayal of our country, our values and everything the British people stand for.”
Hammond also warned that IS was “turning a swathe of Iraq and Syria into a terrorist state as a base for launching attacks on the West”.
He added: “Unless they are stopped, sooner or later they will seek to strike us on British soil.”
A London rapper is being investigated in the hunt for a terrorist dubbed ‘Jihadi John’ who is accused of executing American photojournalist James Foley in Syria.
Abdel-Majed Abdel Bary, 24, from west London, also known as L Jinny, is one of three British jihadis whose activities are reportedly being probed by police over the brutal killing.
Security services are also believed to be hunting Abu Hussain al-Britani, 20, and Abu Abdullah al-Britani, who is in his 20s, as they investigate Islamic State extremists, previously known as Isis.
Bary, who is fighting in Syria under the name Abu Kalashnikov, posted a gruesome picture of himself holding a severed human head on social media just weeks before Mr Foley was beheaded.
The former musician was raised in a Maida Vale council-owned home worth £1mn and has had his songs played on BBC radio stations.
He is the son of high-profile Al Qaeda terror suspect Adel Abdul Bary, who was extradited to the US in 2012 over allegations he masterminded the 1998 bombings of the US embassies in East Africa.
On Friday, one former IS hostage said Foley›s killer was leader of a group of three or four British jihadists, known as the Beatles, who are believed to be the main guards of foreign captives at the IS stronghold of Raqqa in Syria.
It is thought the executioner, believed to be a Londoner, Skyped with Foley’s family in a bid to persuade them to pay a ransom, though some experts believe the IS man in the video may not have actually carried out the murder.
Britain is close to identifying the executioner, its ambassador to the United States, Peter Westmacott, told CNN.
“We are close” to identifying the man in the video, Westmacott told CNN’s State of the Union programme yesterday.
“We’re putting a lot into it,” he said, including using voice-recognition technology to track down the killer.
The masked figure who beheaded Foley in a video released on Tuesday also threatened a second captive American journalist, Steven Sotloff.
Foley was abducted in Syria in November 2012; Sotloff was kidnapped there in 2013.
Westmacott said the problem “goes beyond one horrendous criminal”.