{"id":20809,"date":"2012-07-03T11:11:48","date_gmt":"2012-07-03T08:11:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/?p=20809"},"modified":"2012-07-03T11:12:28","modified_gmt":"2012-07-03T08:12:28","slug":"bashar-al-assad-regrets-downing-of-turkish-jet-20809","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/bashar-al-assad-regrets-downing-of-turkish-jet-20809\/","title":{"rendered":"Bashar al-Assad ‘regrets’ downing of Turkish jet"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/h1>\n

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad regrets that his country’s defence forces shot down a Turkish fighter jet on June 22, a Turkish newspaper \u00a0‘ Cumhuriyet ‘ reports<\/h1>\n

“The plane was flying in an air corridor used three times in the past by the Israeli airforce,” he told Cumhuriyet in an interview published on Tuesday.<\/p>\n

Assad said he regretted the incident – which has further fuelled tensions between the two former allies – “100 per cent”.<\/p>\n

Assad rejected Turkey’s accusations that the Syrian defence forces intentionally shot down the Turkish F-4 jet, which was on a training mission over the Mediterranean.<\/p>\n

“A country at war always acts like this, this plane was flying at a very low altitude and was shot down by anti-aircraft defences which mistook it for an Israeli plane, which attacked Syria in 2007.”<\/p>\n

He said the soldier who shot down the plane had no radar and could not know to which country the plane belonged.<\/p>\n

Assad sent his condolences to the families of the two pilots of the downed plane, who have not been found.<\/p>\n

“If this plane had been shot down in international airspace (as maintained by Ankara) we would not have hesitated to apologise,” he said.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad regrets that his country’s defence forces shot down a Turkish fighter jet on June 22, a Turkish newspaper ‘ Cumhuriyet ‘ reports<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":702,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[80,63,1,118,37,171,173,14],"tags":[26696,13264,9002,16171,19361,2845,16169,26693,26016,26699,17991,17293,13263,15863,26695,26697,26698],"class_list":["post-20809","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-breaking-news","category-daily","category-general","category-hot","category-middle-east","category-turkey","category-turkey-headlines","category-world","tag-al-assad-regrets","tag-bashar-al-assad","tag-syria","tag-syria-assad","tag-syria-bashar-al-assad","tag-syria-damascus","tag-syria-turkey","tag-syria-turkey-crisis","tag-syria-turkey-jet-crisis","tag-syria-turkey-mediterranean","tag-syria-turkey-relations","tag-syria-uprising","tag-syrian-president-bashar-al-assad","tag-turkey-syria","tag-turkish-f-4-jet-down","tag-turkish-fighter-jet","tag-turkish-fighter-jet-syria"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20809","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/702"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20809"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20809\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20809"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20809"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalturk.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20809"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}