Three British girls who crossed into Syria to join the Islamic State group were reportedly helped by a Syrian working as a spy for a country in the US-led coalition.
Meanwhile, video footage emerged purportedly showing the agent helping the girls into a car in southeastern Turkey on their way to Syria.
On Thursday, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu had unexpectedly announced the arrest of an intelligence agent who had helped the three teenage girls cross into Syria.
Amid frenetic speculation over which intelligence agency the man was allegedly spying for, Cavusoglu refrained from giving details.
"The person arrested by us is someone working for an intelligence agency in the coalition," he said in televised comments in Ankara.
The man "is a Syrian citizen," he told reporters alongside his Macedonian counterpart.
The A-Haber television channel broadcast footage, also posted by the website of the Sabah daily, showing the man meeting the three girls at what appears to be a bus station in southern Turkey and then putting them into a car to go to Syria.
Sabah said the agent shot the footage himself although it was not clear how the images had been obtained.
The trio are only partially shown but are all seen wearing Islamic headscarves.
The man, who resembled the individual under arrest in the other footage, greets the three girls and speaks in a mixture of English and Arabic.
"Yalla sis!" ("Let's go, sister"), he says. "Go to this car... one, two, three," he adds, as the baggage is loaded.
"I forget to give you the passports," he says with a laugh. He says "there is a good weather for them" and tells the three it will only take an hour to get to the border.
The Milliyet daily reported on Friday that the individual was working for Canadian intelligence, but Ottawa has already denied this.
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.
Share

