Turkey on Thursday said an intelligence agent working for one of the states in the US-led coalition had been captured for helping three British teenage girls cross into Syria to join Islamic State (IS) militants.
“Do you know who helped those girls? He was captured. He was someone working for the intelligence (service) of a country in the coalition,” Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu told the A-Haber channel in an interview published by the official Anatolia news agency.
He said the agent was neither a national of an EU state, nor the US, without specifying further.
Earlier on March 1, security footage appears to show the teenage British girls waiting at a bus station in Istanbul before travelling to a Turkish town on the Syrian border.
Close friends Kadiza Sultana, 16, and 15-year-olds Shamima Begum and Amira Abase, boarded a flight from London to Istanbul on February 17.
British police, who have said the girls are thought to have since entered Syria, and their families have launched urgent appeals for them to return home.
