Turkey’s president says downing of jet cannot be ignored

Reuters reports: Turkish President Abdullah Gul said on Saturday it was not possible to ignore the fact that Syria had shot down a Turkish fighter jet and said everything that needed to be done following the incident would be done, Turkish media reported.

“It is not possible to cover over a thing like this, whatever is necessary will no doubt be done,” Gul told reporters from the central Anatolian city of Kayseri.

The Turkish military said it had lost contact with one of its F-4 fighter jets off the southern Turkish coast near Syria on Friday morning and Damascus later acknowledged it had shot the plane down.

Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan, who had been returning from a summit in Brazil when the news broke, called an emergency security meeting on his arrival in Ankara and in a statement his office said Ankara would act “decisively” once all the details had emerged.

Syria has said the Turkish aircraft was flying low and well inside Syrian territorial waters when it was shot down. Gul said it was normal for jets to briefly cross into foreign airspace and said a probe into the incident would look at whether in fact it was downed while in Turkish airspace.

“When we think of the speed of these jet planes while flying above the sea, crossing over borders for a short distance and then back again is a little bit routine,” said Gul.

Print Friendly, PDF & Email
Facebooktwittermail

One thought on “Turkey’s president says downing of jet cannot be ignored

  1. Norman

    Testing the waters might be more to the point. If so, this one got caught. This whole exercise is starting to get out of hand, but of course, the idiots who sit in their easy chairs thousands of miles away, can’t see the folly of it all. Perhaps the “O” will call a chill to the election, in the event he loses. Isn’t that how they do it?

Comments are closed.