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| Jordanian Islamic Front Action supporters and Syrians living in Jordan hold Syrian opposition flags and shout slogans during a demonstration to support the Syrian anti-government protesters outside the Syrian embassy in Amman yesterday |
Turkey searched for a missing fighter-jet and held an emergency security summit yesterday, as the prime minister backed off reported comments suggesting Syria had downed the aircraft.
The military plane—reportedly an F-4 Phantom with two pilots aboard—lost radio contact and vanished off radar screens around 0900 GMT over the eastern Mediterranean, near the border with Syria.
Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whose government has had tense relations with Damascus amid the uprising there, met military and intelligence chiefs and key ministers for the security meeting.
He said “an exact explanation could be issued after the summit”.
Earlier, local media had quoted Erdogan as saying that Syria had apologised over the fighter jet crash, in a comment that suggested it had downed the plane.
“Syria immediately offered a very serious apology for the incident and admitted it was a mistake,” the Haberturk daily newspaper quoted Erdogan as saying onboard a plane on his way back from Brazil.
“At this moment the air force and navy are conducting search and rescue operations in the eastern Mediterranean, and luckily our pilots are alive, we have just lost a plane,” he reportedly told the daily.
However, at an Ankara press conference, Erdogan said: “I cannot say it was shot down. It’s not possible to tell before we have exact information,” adding that the details would be clarified after the summit.
Erdogan said he did not have “exact information” but that the meeting would reveal “if Syria really apologised and, if so, why it did”.
The prime minister said he had been told that the plane was 12km off the coast in the south of Turkey’s Hatay province, close to Syria’s Latakia.
“Four gunboats, helicopters and Syrian gunboats are carrying on the joint search,” to locate the plane, he said.
NTV private news channel reported, citing unnamed military sources, that the plane crashed in Syrian territorial waters, and that there had been no violation of the Syrian border.
Meanwhile, the Syrian regime accused rebels yesterday of carrying out a “brutal massacre” of 25 of its supporters.
Monitors said regime forces fired on demonstrators in Syria’s second-largest city Aleppo, killing at least eight people, with another killed in the province of the same name.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights gave a higher toll for the pro-regime losses in the latest reported massacre, saying at least 26 government supporters—most of them members of the feared shabiha militia—had been killed.
In the capital, troops fired on demonstrators in the upscale district of Mazzeh, the Observatory said, without giving any immediate word on casualties.
Protesters in other areas of Damascus and its suburbs were also fired on, the Observatory said, adding that two children were shot dead in two different areas of Damascus province, although not at demonstrations.
In Syria’s third-largest city Homs, residents held a small protest despite a renewed bombardment by government forces of rebel-held neighbourhoods, activists said.
At least 168 were killed in violence on Thursday, the highest single-day toll since a UN-backed ceasefire was meant to have taken effect on April 12, the Observatory said.
In the reported massacre, “armed terrorist groups ... kidnapped a number of citizens in Daret Azzeh area in the countryside of Aleppo, according to official sources in the province,” state Sana news agency said.
“The terrorist groups ... committed a brutal massacre against the citizens ... shooting them dead and then mutilating their bodies.” it added.
“Initial information indicates that more than 25 of the kidnapped citizens were killed ... with the fate of the rest of the kidnapped people still unknown.”
Amateur video posted on YouTube and distributed by the Observatory showed piles of mangled bodies of young men, their clothing soaked in blood. At least two of the bodies in the footage were wearing fatigues.
“These are shabiha of (President) Bashar al-Assad’s regime,” the narrator said, without identifying himself.
The Observatory said a total of at least 55 people were killed in violence across the country yesterday.
On the diplomatic front, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov met Syrian counterpart Walid al-Muallem, urging Damascus to do more to implement the plan of peace envoy Kofi Annan.
“We called on them (the Syrian regime) to back up their declarations about readiness to implement the Kofi Annan plan with deeds,” Lavrov told state television after the meeting in Saint Petersburg, Russia.
“They have already done a lot but they can and must do much more.”
Lavrov said Muallem had promised him in the name of Assad that the government was ready for a “synchronised” withdrawal of troops from Syrian towns as long as the rebel opposition did the same.
“The minister assured me of this today,” he said.