Social media accounts of Austrian girls 'taken over to pretend they are fighting in Syria' #CarryGobySeanKellz #FutureGroupNG via @myentertain9jar

EXTREMISTS have been accused of manipulating the social media accounts of two teenage girls from Austria to make it seem as if they were fighting in Syria.

A photo purporting to be of the two missing girls [CEN]

School friends of Samra Kesinovic, 16, and her friend Sabina Selimovic, 15, confirmed that they had become radicalised after attending a local mosque.
The head of their school in the Austrian capital Vienna, Peter Slanar, said: "I would have said a year ago that they were perfectly normal teenage girls, but then the older, Samra, started sending pictures of herself in the Muslim headscarf to fellow pupils and was trying to convert everybody to her point of view. "There were vandalism incidents in which tables and walls had the words "I love Al Qaeda" written on them.
"We had to act when they started saying that America was to blame for the September 11 attack. That was simply going too far.
"When there were several attempts at intervention that didn't bring a result, we invited Samra's mother for a conversation and she was very annoyed about what her daughter was doing, and took her out of the school in January."
The girls are then thought to have travelled to Turkey, where messages and photographs were posted online claiming that they were fighting with their new husbands in Syria.
But the pictures were quickly shown to be a fake and now Interpol working together with police in Turkey and Austria say that they have managed to confirm that the girls are not in Syria.

Samra Kesinovic, 16, before she disappeared [CEN]

Sabina Selimovic is just 15 [CEN]

They believe the pair are in Turkey, and that whoever helped them to leave the country is manipulating their social media accounts to turn them into pin-up girls for the call to join the civil war.
The family said they have never believed the messages were written by the girls, and authorities suspect that the teenagers had been tricked into leaving the country.
The girls come from Bosnian refugee families who settled in Austria after the ethnic wars of the 1990's and were born in the Alpine Republic.
The faked photos on their Facebook pages show them brandishing Kalashnikov rifles – and in some cases surrounded by armed men. It also showed them announcing their marriage plans so that they could become holy warriors and added: "Death is our goal".
Austrian Interior Ministry spokesman Karl-Heinz Grundboeck said that the girls were some of hundreds from the West who had been indoctrinated by extremists.
He said: "These were people that did not become extremists from nowhere, somebody was responsible."