ANKARA, turkey — Turkey said its air force jet that disappeared over the Mediterranean Sea on Friday was shot down by Syria, in an action likely to worsen already strained relations between the neighboring countries.
A statement after a two-hour security meeting led by Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said the warplane that went missing near Syria was downed by Syrian forces and that the two Turkish pilots remain missing. It said Turkey “will determinedly take necessary steps” in response, without saying what they would be.
Turkey’s military provided no details on the plane’s mission, but some Turkish TV reports said it was on a reconnaissance flight.
Late Friday, Syria’s state-run news agency, SANA, said the military spotted an “unidentified aerial target” that was flying at a low altitude and at a high speed. Syrian air defenses hit it directly, SANA said.
Turkey has joined nations such as the U.S. in saying that Syrian President Bashar Assad should step down because of the uprising in his country. Turkey also has set up refugee camps on its border for more than 32,000 Syrians who have fled the fighting.
Erdogan said the plane went down in the Mediterranean Sea about 8 miles away from the Syrian town of Latakia. Four Turkish gunboats and three helicopters were searching for the pilots and wreckage.
Also Friday, an online video showed more than a dozen bloodied corpses, some of them piled atop each other and in military uniforms, dumped beside a road in northern Syria in what the government Friday called a mass killing by rebel forces.
The circumstances of the deaths were not clear, with the state-run news agency saying at least 25 men were killed. In the video — which The Associated Press could not verify — the narrator said the victims were members of the “shabiha,” or pro-regime gunmen.
