British SAS sniper kills ISIS flamethrower executioner with a crack shot to save 12 hostages

[jmowreader]

76. It's possible he was moving around during the speech, and facing the sniper

.50BMG bullets are not guided projectiles. You have to wait till the guy stops jumping around praising Da'esh and the glory and mercy of Allah ("mercy of Allah" and "execution by flamethrower" don't really go together, but we ARE talking about ISIS, right?) before you can fire if you want to be sure to hit the bastard on your first round. The sniper also wanted to shoot him in the fuel supply (he probably had an old Soviet LPO-50 flamethrower, which comes in two parts - the flamethrower, which looks very much like a machinegun, connected by a hose to a backpack containing three fuel cylinders) so the blast effect from the explosion would take out the other two terrorists; while it's possible the bullet would have passed through the terrorist and breached the fuel tank, it works a hell of a lot better if you just shoot him in the gas tank in the first place.

And also, when Clint Eastwood makes the movie of this mission letting the terrorist finish his dramatic, stirring speech before ending his life is going to make a MUCH better climax than just blowing the guy's shit away the second he gets the opportunity.