SYRIAN transport minister Mahmoud Saeed yesterday accused Turkey of ‘air piracy’ over its forcing down of a Syria-bound passenger aircraft travelling from Russia.
Turkish jet fighters threatened to shoot the plane down if it did not land in the Turkish capital.
Saeed said that Ankara’s move ‘amounted to air piracy which contradicts civil aviation treaties’.
The Syrian Airbus 320 passenger plane which had been coming from Moscow, finally arrived in Damascus at 5.10am yesterday.
Director of the Syrian Arab Airlines, Ghaida Abdullatif, stressed in a statement that the Turkish authorities assaulted the crew before allowing the plane to take off from Ankara Airport because the crew members refused to sign a document saying that the plane made an emergency landing.
Abdullatif said: ‘Turkish F-16 warplanes forced the Syrian plane to land to be searched, doing so in violation of the international procedures in terms of not formerly notifying either its pilot or the Turkish civil airline, which almost caused an air accident due to warplanes coming close at an uncalculated distance.’
She stressed that the Syrian plane was not carrying any illegal materials and that the cargo was in compliance with the international laws and systems having a legal bill of landing.
Abdullatif considered what happened as ‘an inhumane act’ that broke the Chicago Convention on International Civil Aviation.
‘Added to that,’ she said, ‘the long hours during which the passengers were locked in without being provided any services or even informed of what was going on, left them in a state of panic and a very bad psychological condition.’
The Russian Foreign Ministry also expressed its concern over the risks which the passengers of the Syrian plane, including 17 Russians, were subjected to, being locked for eight hours on board.
Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman Alexander Lukashevich said: ‘Neither weapons nor any kind of systems or parts for military equipment were on board or could have been on board.’
He added: ‘We are concerned that this emergency situation put at risk the lives and safety of passengers, who included 17 Russian citizens.
‘The Russian side continues to insist on an explanation of the reasons for such actions by the Turkish authorities toward Russian citizens and to take measures to exclude such incidents in the future.’
The Turkish Foreign Ministry stated that Ankara would continue to intercept and investigate Syrian passenger aircraft using Turkey’s airspace.