Mohammed Emwazi, who has been identified as Islamic State beheader Jihadi John, was arrested in 2009 while trying to board a flight to Johannesburg from Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania.
According to British media, Emwazi was arrested as he tried to force his way past a security checkpoint onto a Johannesburg-bound flight without a passport.
Emwazi has beheaded several Islamic State hostages over the past year.
It is reported that at the time of his arrest in Tanzania he was with two members of Somalia-based Islamic terrorist organisation al-Shabab: Bilal Berjawi and Mohamed Sakr.
They claimed they were on a safari holiday but the Tanzanian security services believed they were planning to travel to terrorist camps in Somalia.
It is not clear why Emwazi wanted to fly to Johannesburg.
South Africa has been a destination for terrorists in the past, the most notorious of whom being the "White Widow", Samantha Lewthwaite, who travelled to this country in 2007 and fraudulently acquired a South African passport.
According to security experts, terrorists prefer South African passports because they are easy to obtain from corrupt officials.
The head of al-Shabab, Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, who was responsible for the US embassy bombings in Nairobi, Kenya, in 1998, was found to be carrying a South African passport when he was shot dead at a police checkpoint four years ago.
Last week spy cables released by TV network al-Jazeera revealed that al-Qaeda planned several bomb attacks in South Africa between 2007 and 2010.
Timeslive
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