VIENNA: Austrian police prevented two schoolgirls aged 14 and 15 from traveling to Syria, officials said Wednesday with press reports saying they wanted to join militants.

European countries have tightened controls to stop people travelling to join Islamic State (IS) militants in Syria and Iraq, not all of them men.

The two girls were picked up by police in the southern Austrian city of Graz “with full suitcases ... intending to go to Syria,” Interior Ministry Spokesman Alexander Marakovits told AFP.

The Kronen Zeitung daily reported that the two girls got to know each other on the Web and that one of them had said she wanted “to support IS, it doesn’t matter where.”

The Vienna mother of one of the Muslim girls, one of them a recent convert to Islam, went to the police on Friday and they were picked up at the home of a friend in Graz the next day.