The father of one of three schoolgirls believed to have fled to Syria to join Islamic State said her family “cannot stop crying” as he appealed for her to return home.

Abase Hussen, 47, said his daughter Amira Abase told him she was going to a wedding on the morning she travelled to Gatwick airport to fly to Turkey, and had been behaving “in a normal way”.

“She said ‘daddy, I’m in a hurry’,” he said. “There was no sign to suspect her at all.”

Speaking at Scotland Yard’s headquarters, Abase said his daughter had not spoken about Syria or politics with her family but he did not know if she had discussions with her friends. He said the family had asked her about a fellow pupil at Bethnal Green Academy in east London who fled to Syria in December.

“She said, ‘I don’t know dad, maybe her father knows. I’m sad for that little girl’, she always said.”

Abase said his daughter, 15, sent a text between 10am and 11am on Tuesday.

“She said, ‘dad the place is a little bit far. I pray my midday pray and I get back’. She didn’t come home,” he said. Abase said the family reported her missing at about midnight on Tuesday.

“We are depressed, and it’s very stressful. The message we have for Amira is to get back home. We miss you. We cannot stop crying. Please think twice. Don’t go to Syria.” Abase clutched a teddy bear dressed in a Chelsea shirt with the words “number one mum” on its foot which Amira gave to her mother on Mother’s Day.

Police are urgently trying to trace Amira and her friends Shamima Begum, 15, and Kadiza Sultana, 16. Their families have also appealed for them to come home. The girls, who are all from east London and pupils at Bethnal Green Academy, have been described as “straight A students”.

Scotland Yard revealed the girls were previously spoken to by officers investigating the disappearance of the other 15-year-old girl to Syria in December. But there was “nothing to suggest at the time” that the trio were at risk and their disappearance has “come as a great surprise, not least to their own families”, a spokesman said.

The girls left their homes before 8am on Tuesday providing their families with “plausible” reasons as to why they would be out for the day, police said.

They boarded a Turkish Airlines flight, TK1966, which departed at 12.40pm to Istanbul and landed at 6.40pm local time.

Abase posed for a photograph with Shamima’s relatives at New Scotland Yard in London as they urged the girls to come home. Shamima’s older sister Renu Begum, 27, said their mother last saw her on Tuesday morning as she got on a bus after claiming she had extra classes at school.

Begum said her sister did not leave any messages and there was “nothing unusual about her behaviour”.

She said she hopes the girls travelled to “talk some sense” into their friend who went to Syria in December. “She was upset about her friend leaving,” she went on. “She knew it was a silly thing to do.