LONDON - The financial backers of a campaign group that had contact with the man later known as "Jihadi John" are under pressure from British politicians and a regulator's investigation to explain why they gave it several hundred thousand pounds.
The Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust, a Quaker foundation, and The Roddick Foundation, set up by the late founder of beauty retailer Body Shop, are among those now being asked how they came to fund Cage, a small activist group that called Mohammed Emwazi, killer of American, British and Syrian hostages, a once "beautiful young man."
"I condemn anybody who attempts to excuse that barbarism away in the way that has been done by Cage," British interior minister Theresa May told parliament in response to the comment by Cage's research boss Asim Qureshi to media last week.
Cage was set up by a group of London Muslims with the aim of supporting British suspects being held by the United States in Guantanamo Bay. Its activists blame U.S. and British foreign policy for radicalizing Muslims and accuse the security services of harassing those who refuse to be informants.
Britain's Charity Commission, a government-backed regulator, has launched an investigation into whether Cage's funders had ensured that their money was only used for purposes in line with their objectives. The Commission said in a statement on Monday that it had compliance cases open into the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Foundation and the Roddick Foundation.
"In both cases the commission’s regulatory concerns revolve around how the trustees have ensured that charitable grants made to non-charitable bodies are only used for exclusively charitable purposes in line with their objects," it said.
The Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust said in a statement that it had made three grants to Cage in 2007, 2008 and 2011, making a combined total of 305,000 pounds. It said its last grant payment to them was in January 2014.
The Roddick Foundation, set up to "support those who change the world," gave Cage 35,000 pounds a year in the financial years ending in March 2012 and 2013, and 25,000 pounds a year in the financial years ending in March 2010 and 2011, according to accounts made public by the Charity Commission.
The Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust said it stood by its funding.
"We believe (Cage) has played an important role in highlighting the ongoing abuses at Guantanamo Bay and at many other sites around the world, including many instances of torture," it said in a statement.
The Roddick Foundation could not be reached for comment as its listed phone number was disconnected and emails to its public email address bounced back. Attempts to reach trustee Gordon Roddick via other organizations to which he is connected yielded no response.
The relationship between Emwazi and Cage began in 2009, when he visited its drab office block in a back street behind the East London Mosque.
Cage held a news conference last week to publish emails sent to it from Emwazi over several years during which time he complained of being regularly harassed by security services.
On its website, the group says: "Cage has been campaigning against the War on Terror for more than a decade."
Public information about Cage's finances is scant: It is listed in the UK companies register, but has filed accounts only for 2008 and as a small company it is not obliged to report each year.
According to Qureshi and its website, Cage is a non-profit making company limited by guarantee, a structure without share capital that is usually used to protect the people running the company from personal liability for its debts.
The group's other main funder, according to Qureshi, is the Network for Social Change, which describes itself as "a group of individuals providing funding for progressive social change."
But the administrator for the Network for Social Change Charitable Trust, Tish McCrory, said its vehicle for donating to non-charitable projects, Funding for Social Change Limited, had not funded Cage "for some time."
A British lawmaker told Reuters all of the charities that had funded Cage should dissociate from it after the group's comments at last week's news conference.
"It was both extraordinary and disgraceful, they were very clearly coming out as apologists for terrorism. ... Those that have provided them with support must very seriously question not only their support for Cage but how they got to make such a decision to support an organization like this," said John Spellar, a spokesman on foreign affairs for the opposition Labor Party.