THERESA MAY is preparing to introduce new powers to stop teenage girls leaving Britain to become jihadist brides with foreign terror groups.
Under new anti-terror laws, the home secretary will be able to prevent airlines from carrying suspect passengers on routes known to be used by aspiring jihadists.
Terror suspects and “children” who may be attempting to leave Britain to become involved in “terrorism-related activity” would be prevented from boarding a plane, under legislation due to go before parliament this week.
Airlines would have to produce their passenger lists and seek “authority to carry” on certain routes known to be used by Britons trying to reach Isis-controlled territory.
High-risk passengers would be automatically flagged up under an automatic system and blocked from boarding.
Advertisement
The government is also preparing to introduce a £50,000 fine for airlines that refuse to give Britain passenger lists of people flying to the UK. One in five airlines currently refuses to provide these lists.
The move comes as it emerged that three teenage girls from London who secretly left Britain are believed to have reached Raqqa, the Syrian stronghold of Isis, also known as Islamic State.
Schoolfriends Shamima Begum, 15, Kadiza Sultana, 16, and Amira Abase, 15, are being housed there in a building run by an all-female religious police unit, according to sources in the Isis-controlled Syrian city.
The burqa-clad Al-Khansaa Brigade is a feared arm of Isis’s secret police and patrols Raqqa’s streets reporting any dissent to senior commanders.
Other British members of the brigade are believed to include Aqsa Mahmood, 20, a former private-school girl who left her Glasgow home last year to join Isis and marry a jihadist.
Advertisement
Begum is believed to have been in contact with Mahmood, who is now an online recruiter for Isis, in the days before the three girls left.
Families of the teenagers, who were students at Bethnal Green Academy, in east London, yesterday claimed that police had failed to tell them that a 15-year-old friend had disappeared two months earlier to join Isis in Syria.
After the disappearance of the teenager — known only as girl 1 — seven students were identified as being in her “friendship group”, including Begum, Sultana and Abase, and were talked to at the school by a police officer.
Their families yesterday said the police had written letters to inform them their children had been friends with a pupil who had gone abroad and ask permission to take a formal statement. But instead of sending the letters directly to the three families, they were handed to the teenagers, who then hid them in school textbooks in their bedrooms.
Halima Khanom, Sultana’s elder sister, said: “We did not know how serious the situation was. Knowing my sister was very close to that girl, if we had known, we would have taken steps.”
Advertisement
Scotland Yard yesterday issued an initial statement disclosing that the families had been contacted by the school’s deputy head teacher and told that the missing girl had travelled to Syria.“She asked them to come back to the school or police with any information,” the statement said.
But the Yard later admitted that the school had told the families only that the girl had been reported missing and not that she was likely to be en route to Syria. The police also acknowledged that “with the benefit of hindsight” the letters could have been delivered directly to the parents.
Meanwhile, sources in Syria this weekend said Begum, Sultana and Abase, who left the country on February 17, had been smuggled into Syria from Turkey with the help of a Saudi member of the terror group.
The fixer, who is based in an old police station in the west of Raqqa, is in charge of masterminding the travel arrangements of foreigners trying to join the jihad, it is claimed.
Sources claim the three girls were taken to a building, which is run by the Al-Khansaa Brigade and known to provide temporary accommodation for unmarried, single jihadist women before they are found permanent homes or marry Isis fighters.