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Sunday, March 22, 2015

Runaway schoolgirls' contact in Turkey 'confesses to Isis link as cash courier'

Man arrested last week told police he delivered foreign donations to militants in Sanliurfa close to Syrian border, according to Turkish newspaper

An agent who helped three British schoolgirls cross into Syria to join the Islamic State group was also working as a courier to transfer money to jihadis, a Turkish newspaper reported on Sunday.
Turkey announced on Thursday that it had arrested an intelligence agent working as a spy for an unidentified country in the US-led coalition and said he was a Syrian national.
Media reports in Turkey have said he was working for Canadian intelligence – a claim rejected by Ottawa.
The Milliyet newspaper reported that the man, a dentist using the name Doctor Mehmed Resid, told Turkish police during questioning that he had withdrawn the cash from Western Union branch and delivered it to Syrian jewellers working in the south-eastern Turkish city of Sanliurfa close to the Syrian border.
The jewellers then contacted their colleagues in Syria and a middleman would come to their shops.
The agent told investigators that his brother, who lived in the Syrian city of Raqqa, an Isis stronghold, received the money from the jewellers and delivered it to militants, according to Milliyet.
The report did not reveal who sent the money, only that it came from abroad.
Video footage that emerged on Friday purportedly showed the same man helping the British girls into a car in Sanliurfa on their way to Syria.
Kadiza Sultana, 16, and Shamima Begum and Amira Abase, both 15, entered Syria after boarding a flight from London to Istanbul on 17 February.
They took a bus from Istanbul to Sanliurfa, from where they are believed to have crossed the frontier.

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