ANKARA // Three British girls who crossed into Syria to join ISIL fighters were helped by a Syrian national working as an intelligence agent for one of the countries in the US-led coalition against the group, the Turkish foreign minister said Friday.
Foreign minister Mevlut Cavusoglu unexpectedly announced on Thursday that Turkey had arrested an intelligence agent who had helped the teenagers over the Syrian border.
But amid frenetic speculation over which intelligence agency was involved, Mr Cavusoglu gave no details over who the Syrian was working for.
“The person arrested by us is someone working for an intelligence agency in the coalition,” he said in televised comments, adding that the individual “is a Syrian citizen.”
The Milliyet newspaper reported on Friday that the individual was working for Canadian intelligence but this has already been denied by Ottawa.
A senior official in Ottawa said on Thursday that the suspect “is not a Canadian citizen” and “was not employed by” its spy agency.
Close friends Kadiza Sultana, 16, and 15-year-olds Shamima Begum and Amira Abase, crossed into Syria after boarding a flight from London to Istanbul on February 17.
They took a bus from Istanbul to the southeastern Turkish city of Sanliurfa close to the Syrian border, from where they are believed to have crossed the frontier.
Mr Cavusoglu had said the day earlier that the person arrested was not from the European Union or the United States.
Meanwhile, the Turkish coastguard opened fire to stop a cargo vessel carrying 337 mainly Syrian migrants that was heading towards European Union waters, and arrested the suspected traffickers, a top local official said on Friday.
On Thursday evening, the coastguard launched an operation to chase down the 59 metre Dogan Kartal as it headed through the Dardanelles Straits in north-west Turkey.
The vessel initially paid no heed to calls to stop – including warning shots – but was eventually forced to halt when guards fired on the engines, the official Anatolia news agency reported.
“It stopped when the engines were fired on and then came to a complete halt when the steering wheel was locked,” Ahmet Cinar, head of the western Canakkale province where the Straits are located, told the agency. He did not give further details on how the vessel was brought to a stop.
Anatolia said 337 mainly Syrian migrants were on board the ship, including 85 children and 68 women.
* Agence France-Presse
