"Jihadi John" heard complaining about interrogations

LONDON -- When Mohamed Emwazi was outed last week as "Jihadi John," the apparent head executioner for ISIS, an advocacy group in London claimed they knew him as "a beautiful young man."

The implication by the group called CAGE, reports CBS News' Mark Phillips, was that Emwazi was driven to murderous extremism, at least in part, by years of constant harassment by the British security services.

Now, CAGE has released an audio tape of Emwazi describing to members of the group his questioning at the hands of an anti-terror officer.

Emwazi told CAGE that the agent asked him what he thought of the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan. He said he replied by asking rhetorically, "what do you think? We see the news, innocent people are getting killed."

"Then he started telling me, 'what do you think of 9/11,'" Emwazi says in the audio recording. "I told him, 'this is a wrong thing, what happened was wrong.'"

That was in 2009, when Emwazi was known to be associating with other suspected extremists, and when he was deported from Tanzania and accused of trying to join Islamic militants further up the east African coast in Somalia.

"I told him everything that's been happening is extremism," Emwazi told CAGE about his interrogation by British security services. "Anything like bombs or whatever that's been happening they're all from extremists, and he looked at me and said, 'I still believe that you're going to Somalia to train.'"

The audios give only Emwazi's version of events, but in the end, Emwazi made it to Syria, joined ISIS and became the apparent beheader of American, British and Japanese captives.

The suggestion that his recent behavior was somehow the result of police interrogations has been met with incredulity, and anger.