Jihadi fakes his death and returns from the dead – How life imitated my blog post.

In October 2014, I wrote this blog post – offering up the plot of a film or TV show based around the idea of a jihadi faking his death to return home.

Imagine my shock when I read this news story.

It’s basically exactly the same concept, but this was real life. It looked like life had imitated one of my blog posts.

In more detail, here’s the crux of the two scenarios, one merely conceptual, and one real, but both have exactly the same basic principle; a Western jihadi fakes his death in the Middle East in order to return home undetected.

In October 2014, whilst following many of the news stories that came out of Syria and Iraq about the rise of Islamic State and the potential threat of homegrown terrorists returning from overseas conflicts, I was struck by an idea.

The press in the UK had intermittently been reporting on the deaths of British citizens who had gone to fight with Islamic groups in the Middle East. Typically, their deaths came to the media’s attention via social media. It was not a great stretch of the imagination to imagine MI5 terror analysts looking at these reports and ticking off the names as they were reported killed.

But what if they weren’t really dead?

A good way to return to the UK, or anywhere else for that matter, without the unwanted attention of the security services would be to do so as someone else entirely. What better way to stop people looking for you than if everyone thinks you’re dead?

So I wrote a brief blog post outlining this concept to reflect my musings on the subject. I packaged it up like a potential storyline for a film or TV series. After all, it’s not too dissimilar to the plot of Homeland.

Read the post here.

Aleppo, Syria (Javier Manzano/AFP/Getty Images)

Now, in January 2015, the media reported a story about exactly the scenario I described. Imran Khawaja, 27, of Southall, west London, traveled to Syria to train and fight, and had then been falsely pronounced dead via social media. He was subsequently arrested in Dover while trying to re-enter the UK, under a false identity.

Read the story here.

The news has only recently been released now that the case has been heard in court, but the events all took place last year, way before my vague ramblings on the matter, but it shows that I was not the only one who had considered this idea. No doubt this individual is not the first to have tried this, and there’s no real way of knowing if it has indeed been successful in the past.

This seems to be a strange case of life imitating blog posts. It shows that ideas can be generated from pretty much anywhere. News stories are often larger than life examples of real life, often sounding too outlandish to be real. Yet they make great stories for films, TV, and novels.

Next time you see or hear a dramatic news story, think about how it would play out on the screen…

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