PARAMARIBO, Suriname (CMC) – The 16-year-old Jamaican teenager denied entry into Suriname last weekend after Immigrations officers suspected that he was travelling to join the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) through Turkey, is not the first alleged ISIS recruit to be banned by Suriname, according to media reports published on Monday.

The De Ware Tijd newspaper said that on at least two previous occasions, Immigrations officers encountered suspected ISIS recruits at the Johan Adolf Pengel Airport, but they were allowed to continue their journeys after Suriname checked their stories with regional intelligence services.

The paper did not mention the nationalities and other information about the suspected recruits and neither did it provide a source for the information. It said that Melvin Linscheer, the director of the Bureau National Security, declined to comment on the “information”.

“Suriname could definitely be a transition point for these types of people; for instance because we have daily flights to Europe. That is why we established the Counter Terrorism Unit. Not because we think Suriname is a target, but because we could be a hub from which they travel to their end destinations,” Linscheer told the newspaper.

On Saturday, police said the teenager arrived at the Johan Adolf Pengel Airport on a flight from Jamaica, intending to transit to the Netherlands, from where he would travel to Turkey.

“He was denied entry to Suriname because we received information from the regional intelligence service that he wanted to join ISIS,” the police said without identifying the teenager.