Hayat Boumeddiene, the wanted partner of one of the gunmen shot dead by police after three days of high drama in France, arrived in Turkey before the killings and may now be in Syria, a Turkish security source says.

“She entered Turkey on January 2,” the source said, adding that she was believed to have moved on to the southeastern Turkish city of Sanliurfa and then to Syria but there was “no concrete data” to prove it.

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The source said Turkey did not arrest her because of a lack of intelligence from France.

“We do not have the luxury to prevent everyone entering without intelligence sharing,” the source said.

Earlier on Saturday a French police source said that Boumeddiene was likely in Turkey at the time of the Paris killings.

Police initially suspected the 26-year-old may have had a role in her partner Amedy Coulibaly’s acts of violence on Thursday and Friday when he shot dead a policewoman and took people hostage in a Paris siege of a Jewish kosher store.

The source, who declined to be named, said she had left for Turkey “some time ago” and investigators were checking whether she was now in Syria.

French police issued a public appeal to locate her following the bloody events of Friday, providing a mugshot showing a sleepy-eyed young woman, her face and brown hair showing, whom they had questioned in 2010 about Coulibaly.

Police have warned that Boumeddiene, now France’s most wanted woman, is considered “armed and dangerous”.