Pilots of Turkish Plane Downed by Syria Are Found

The New York Times, Istanbul, Turkey July 4, 2012 — Aided by the American explorer who found the wreck of the Titanic, rescue teams from Turkey on Wednesday located the bodies of two Turkish pilots whose unarmed jet was downed in the Mediterranean by Syrian gunners nearly two weeks ago.
Turkish military authorities said the bodies of the pilots were discovered in an unspecified location on the seabed. It was not made clear whether they were near the wreckage of their aircraft or whether they were still strapped into their cockpit ejector seats.
The June 22 downing of the plane, an RF-4 reconnaissance aircraft, worsened the already tense relationship between Turkey and Syria, formerly close neighbors who have fallen out because of the Syrian government’s harsh repression of an uprising that is now 16 months old. Turkey is allowing Syrian insurgents sanctuary along the 550-mile border with Syria, and thousands of Syrian refugees have taken shelter in Turkish camps.
Turkey said the plane was conducting a harmless mission to test the nation’s radar system when it was shot down in international airspace after briefly straying into Syrian territory in the Mediterranean border region shared by Turkey’s Hatay province and Syria’s Latakia province. Syria says the plane was shot in Syrian airspace by gunners who had mistaken the Turkish plane for an Israeli one.
Turkey, a NATO member, has rejected that explanation as absurd, citing intercepted communications that showed the Syrians knew exactly whom they were shooting at. Turkey has won NATO’s full support in the dispute, deployed antiaircraft batteries along the Syrian border and warned Syrian aircraft to stay away.
Turkish news outlets said the rescue efforts to locate the pilots, Gokhan Ertan and Hasan Huseyin Aksoy, were aided at Turkey’s request by the Nautilus, an American deep-sea exploration vessel led by Robert Ballard, the oceanographer who discovered the wreckage of the Titanic in 1985.
Mr. Ballard had earlier arrived in Turkey for a scientific expedition in the Black Sea and the eastern Mediterranean, news reports said.
In an interview published in a Turkish newspaper on Tuesday, President Bashar al-Assad of Syria said he regretted the downing of the Turkish plane but repeated Syria’s version of what had happened.
The discovery of the pilots’ bodies ended waning hopes in Turkey that they had somehow survived. Officials have said they expect the wreckage of the aircraft, once retrieved, will provide the evidence of precisely how the plane was shot down.