A British associate of Jihadi John has been arrested on suspicion of plotting to carry out Paris-style attacks in Turkey, officials said last night (Sunday).
Aine Lesley Davis, who was born in Hammersmith, west London, is believed to be one of several British Isil followers who guarded the foreigners that Jihadi John slaughtered.
Davis was held in Istanbul last week, shortly before the drone strike that killed Jihadi John, whose real name was Mohammed Emwazi.
Turkish officials told Reuters that Davis was detained alongside a number of other people suspected of planning an attack to coincide with those that killed 129 people in Paris on Friday.
"Davis is a figure with key responsibilities within Islamic State and he wasn't caught alone," the source said. "Right now, we're investigating whether they were planning an attack in Istanbul similar to the one in Paris. We suspect there could have been a parallel attack with Paris, on the same day."
Davis, a former Tube driver, is believed to have converted to Islam while serving a jail sentence in Britain. He had convictions for drug dealing and firearms possession. The son of a dinner lady and a John Lewis shopworker, he abandoned London to become a jihadist in Syria, and has posed for pictures with fighters in combat fatigues.
Last year, Davis's wife, Amal El-Wahabi, became the first person in Britain to be convicted of funding jihadi fighters in Syria and was jailed for two years. The court was told that she knew her husband was "engaged in violence with guns for extremist religious and ideological reasons" in Syria.
Turkish officials said in a separate move, eight people suspected of Isil links were arrested yesterday in the Turkish capital, Ankara. The detentions are the latest in what many of Turkey's Western allies see as a belated crackdown on the group as it starts to increase its attacks on Turkish soil.
A senior Turkish official said: "Right now, the threats and attacks from Islamic State, which came once every six or seven months, are coming every one or two months. This is a very serious problem."