Syria regrets shooting Turkish jet

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad said he regrets the shooting-down of a Turkish jet by his forces, and he will not allow tensions with its neighbor to deteriorate into an "armed conflict", a Turkish newspaper reported on Tuesday.

"I would have wished 100 percent that we had not attacked it," he said as an explanation of his military's action in an interview with a Turkish newspaper Cumhuriyet, two weeks after the F-4 Phantom jet was shot at and crashed into the Mediterranean off Syria.

According to Syria it flew very low inside its airspace, but Turkey said the jet was hit in international airspace after it briefly strayed into Syria.

"A country at war always acts like this, this plane was flying at a very low altitude and was shot down by anti-aircraft defenses which mistook it for an Israeli plane, which attacked Syria in 2007," Assad said, rejecting Turkey's accusations that the Syrians intentionally targeted the jet.

He said the soldier who shot down the plane had no radar and could not know to which country the plane belonged.

Assad sent his condolences to the families of the two pilots who have not been found.

He said Syria "would not have hesitated to apologize" for the shooting if the plane had not been shot down in Syrian airspace. He said the rise of tensions could have been prevented if channels of communication between the two militaries remained open.

"We are in a state of war, so every unidentified plane is an enemy plane," the paper quoted Assad as saying. "Let me state it again - we did not have the slightest idea about its identity when we shot it down."

The Syrian leader expressed the desire to turn the page on the incident that has fuelled tensions with its former ally.

Turkey viewed the loss of its fighter jet as a hostile act and has taken steps to fortify its border with Syria.

"We do not want to even consider that this plane was sent deliberately into our airspace," Assad said.

"We want to think of it as a pilot's error and consider this as an isolated incident, which shouldn't be exaggerated, We have nothing to gain in attacking a Turkish fighter jet."

In another bid to assuage relations with Ankara, Assad said Syria had no plans to fuel tensions along their borders, including sending troops there, even after Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan sent reinforcements of Turkish troops to the frontier.

Commenting for the first time on a UN-brokered plan for a political transition in Syria that was adopted by world powers at a conference in Geneva on Saturday, Assad also said he was "pleased" that the decision about Syria's future was left to its people.

At least 78 people were confirmed killed in violence across Syria on Monday, said observers.

AFP - AP