Former ISIS-fighter claims that the captured British journalist John Cantlie is still alive

A French ISIS member claims that he saw captured journalist John Cantlie alive in the regime’s capital Raqqa earlier this year.

The British war correspondent was reported dead after operations to retake the Iraqi city of Mosul ended in the summer.

Iraqi media sources said the captive – taken almost five years ago on 22 November 2012 – had perished but no body had been found.

And now a former ISIS member has told French magazine Paris Match that he saw John – captured with American reporter James Foley, who was later beheaded by Brit fanatic Jihadi John – in the Syrian city of Raqqa – 300 miles from Mosul.

He told the magazine in October that he saw him ‘seven or eight months ago, in my prison, with an interpreter’.

The ISIS man claimed John, 47, was working for the regime, speaking to prisoners and asking them about their conditions in jail.

He said: ‘He presented me with a pass on which I immediately recognised the green stamp of Baghdadi himself.

‘All ISIS authorities, emirs and soldiers are asked to facilitate the work of John Cantlie,’ said the document.

‘I welcomed him and he went to interrogate the prisoners: how were they there? What were their conditions of detention? What they ate, if they were well treated.

‘Then he left. It is not official, but his companions in ISIS, say that he joined Daesh.’

Raqqa has now fallen to Syrian forces but many ISIS leaders have fled and could have taken captured John with them.

He was seen as a prize asset in their propaganda war and was forced to take part in a string of videos – filmed mainly in Mosul.

In the last film he featured in – released in July 2016 – he was made to walk around Mosul acting as a news reporter and showing the damage airstrikes had done to the city.

Source: Daily Mail