Relatives of three sisters and nine children feared to have travelled to Syria have complained they are receiving no help from the British police, leaving them to investigate the disappearances "off their own backs".
The women and children from Bradford, aged between three and 34, are believed to have travelled to Syria after going missing following a pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia.
The husbands of the missing women are said to be distraught. Their lawyer said they had been told there was only one British police officer in Turkey trying to prevent Britons from joining extremists in Syria and Iraq. Bradford police confirmed yesterday that the counterterrorism unit is leading on the case.
Balaal Khan, representing the husbands of the Dawood sisters, said they had been forced to rely on their own inquiries but that was like “trying to find a needle in a haystack”.
Grave concerns He
said: “They [the fathers] have grave concerns because the matter was reported on the 11th [of June]. Obviously today we’re on the 16th and we’ve had no answers.
“We’ve been informed that there’s only one [police] officer [in Turkey] so what West Yorkshire police have to do is contact the Met police, who then contact the officer in Turkey, who I’m told is inundated with loads of inquiries and we were told that the officer doesn’t have enough time.”
Two of the women’s husbands were due to hold a press conference at which more details would be released.
Scotland Yard confirmed that the counterterrorism officer in Turkey had extremely limited scope and acted only in co-operation with the local authorities, and implied that families may have unrealistic expectations about what police can do once their relatives leave the UK.
“We have no powers in that jurisdiction, we can’t go over to other countries and start setting up offices,” a spokesperson said. “We rely on the Turkish police and we have a good relationship with them, which have had good results in a number of cases in recent weeks. But beyond that is not realistic.”
Zulfi Karim, secretary of the Bradford council for mosques, advised caution before jumping to conclusions about where the women had gone and why. “Something about this just doesn’t add up to me,” he said. “How would these women have been able to enter Saudi Arabia without their husbands or an adult male family member to act as a mahram [male familial chaperone]?”
Fears for the missing families has prompted a political row over the causes of radicalisation. Sayeeda Warsi, the first Muslim to serve in cabinet, said radicalisation of British Muslims represented a “generational challenge” the government was failing to tackle.
The Labour MP for Bradford West, Naz Shah, said she had spoken to two of the fathers and described them as “confused”, adding they had had no contact with the women or children.
She said: "I asked them if there was any indication and they said absolutely not – it was a shock to them, it came out of the blue. The men are very, very distraught." – (Guardian service)