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.
The episode underscored the charged atmosphere in the region as the Syrian revolt degenerates into an armed conflict that many fear will spill beyond that country’s borders and draw in its neighbors. Compounding the tensions, Turkey has emerged as the main conduit for the weaponry that is flowing to Syrian rebels with funds from Saudi Arabia and Qatar and some facilitation by the United States.
It is not the first time Turkey has been ensnared in the violence since the uprising against President Bashar al-Assad’s rule erupted 15 months ago, souring the once close relationship between Damascus and Ankara. After Syrian forces fired shots across the border into a Syrian refugee camp in April, Turkey threatened to invoke a mutual defense clause in the NATO charter.
Syria seemed anxious to downplay the incident. “There was no aggression,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Jihad Makdissi said on his Twitter account. “It was an unidentified target flying at very low range when it violated Syrian airspace.” He also emphasized the role Syrian vessels were playing in helping search for the missing pilots.
The shooting nonetheless comes at a moment of heightened international concern about the spiraling violence in Syria in the wake of the collapse of a UN peace plan brokered by special envoy Kofi Annan. The U.N. monitors who were dispatched to Syria to observe a now non-existent ceasefire have been confined to their hotels because it is too dangerous for them to go out, and the U.N. Security Council remains divided over what alternatives to pursue.
At a press conference in Geneva, Annan warned that unless the international community agrees on a way forward soon, “it will be too late to stop the crisis from spiraling out of control.”
The disappearance of the Turkish plane came a day after a Syrian pilot flew his MiG-21 fighter jet to Jordan and requested political asylum, in the first such defection since the uprising began. The defection was a major embarrassment for Assad’s government and is likely to have led to increased vigilance around Syria’s borders in case other pilots attempt to flee.
Meanwhile, violence continued in Syria on Friday, with the opposition Local Coordination Committees reporting the deaths of 55 people nationwide. Among them were at least eight people shot dead while staging an anti-government protest in the Salaheddine neighborhood of the northern city of Aleppo.
In addition, the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported the discovery of the bodies of 25 men in one of the rural areas of Aleppo province that are slipping out of government control. They had apparently been executed in a mass killing by rebel forces, the group said.
A video posted on YouTube showed blood-soaked bodies strewn beside a bullet-riddled pickup truck along a deserted, unpaved rural road. Some were wearing military fatigues, others jeans and T-shirts.
The voice of the man filming the scene identifies the dead men as “Assad’s shabiha,” a reference to the informal pro-government militias that the opposition blames for much of the violence taking place. But it offers no other details.
Syria’s state news agency SANA also reported the deaths, saying that “armed terrorists” had committed a “brutal massacre” in the Daret Azzeh area of Aleppo.
The report said that 25 people were killed and that an unspecified number also had been kidnapped.
Special correspondent Suzan Haidamous contributed to this report.