ANKARA: A Turkish court has charged a 17-year-old boy with the murder of two Irish women, the Anatolia news agency reported Saturday.
The youth, named by media as Recep Cetin, was ordered held in a juvenile detention centre late Friday pending trial for the killing of Marion Graham and Kathy Dinsmore, it said.
Earlier reports said Cetin, a waiter in the western resort of Kusadasi, had confessed to committing the crime because he wanted to marry Graham's 15-year-old daughter but her mother did not approve.
The girl, Shannon, raised the alert after she failed to contact her mother and the two women.
Her boyfriend told police that he took the two women to Izmir, about 75 miles (120 kilometres) north of Kusadasi, by taxi, pretending they were going to meet his father, and then committed the murder in a forest.
He was betrayed by bloodstained clothing found in a waste-bin.
The Turkish police also detained Cetin's father and the taxi driver in Kusadasi, but they were later released, Anatolia said.
Shannon's father, Raymond McGuinness, who was flying out Saturday to be with his daughter, told British media that after the women disappeared, Cetin came back to Shannon and told her they had all been kidnapped.
"He told Shannon that he had tried to stop the kidnappers and he had a cut on his hand and that's how he suffered it," he said.
McGuinness, who according to the BBC owns the apartment in Kusadasi where the two women and his daughter were staying, said he had never been sure about the relationship with Cetin.
"There was always something that was not quite right. He had a look in his eyes - you could see the jealousy," he said.
McGuinness said Cetin, whom they knew as Alex, often called his house to speak to Shannon and was "always on Facebook", adding: "He was almost, you might say, obsessed by her. He was just mad about her."
