The mother of a 19-year-old girl from Maastricht, now under arrest after spending nine months in Syria as a jihadi bride, was never in Syria, according to justice officials.

The family lawyer Françoise Landerloo said earlier the girl’s mother had been to Syria twice in an effort to bring back her daughter, a Muslim convert who went to Syria in February.

However, Maastricht’s chief public prosecutor Roger Bos told local television on Thursday evening the girl’s mother has never been in Syria, as claimed.

Bos told broadcaster L1 the girl’s mother is likely to have waited for her at the Turkish-Syrian border and not in Raqqa. ‘The mother was not in Syria,’ Bos said.

The girl, who adopted the Muslim name Aïcha, went to Syria to marry high profile Dutch jihadi Omar Yilmaz. She is currently being held in a police cell and is banned from all contact with the outside world.

Her story hit the headlines earlier this week after it emerged she could not return to the Netherlands because her passport had been cancelled.

Landerloo told the NRC she would not comment about the public prosecutor’s claims because the case is not supposed to be discussed in the public arena. ‘And I will ask Bos on Friday why this does not apply to him,’ she said.