Turkey promises 'decisive' action after Syria shoots down its fighter jet

Syria : Turkey promises ‘decisive’ action after Syria shoots down its fighter jet

BEIRUT — Turkey vowed to take “necessary steps” after concluding that Syria had shot down a Turkish fighter jet near the two countries’ border Friday, sending tensions soaring in the already fraught region.

In a terse statement issued early Saturday after an emergency security meeting called by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish government said that an F-4 fighter jet that went missing over the southern Turkish province of Hatay had been brought down by Syria. The statement said Turkey “will make its final position known once the evidence is uncovered and will determinedly take necessary steps.”

The Turkish military said Friday that it had lost contact with the plane shortly before noon. A hunt was underway in the eastern Mediterranean for the jet’s two missing pilots, and Syrian vessels were helping Turkish ships and helicopters with the search, Erdogan told journalists earlier in the evening.

After Turkey, a NATO member, confirmed the shooting, a Syrian military spokesman issued a statement acknowledging that it had shot the plane down at 11:40 am, after it approached Syria at low altitude from the sea.

“An unidentified aerial target violated Syrian airspace, coming from the west at a very low altitude and at high speed over territorial waters, so the Syrian anti-air defenses counteracted with anti-aircraft artillery,” said the statement, carried by the official news agency SANA. The plane was a kilometer (half-mile) from the Syrian coast when it was hit and it came down an estimated 10 kilometers (6 miles) away, in Syrian territorial waters, the statement said.

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