RUSSIAN JET DOWNED, PILOT KILLED
Rebels tried to capture and take him hostage, says monitor group
ARUSSIAN pilot was killed on Saturday after his warplane was downed over northwest Syria, Russia’s Defence Ministry and a monitoring agency said.
Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), a jihadist-dominated alliance, said it had shot down the plane but made no mention of the pilot.
“We were able to bring down the Russian warplane with a shoulder-fired missile above Saraqib in Idlib this afternoon,” said Mahmoud al-Turkmani who, according to the statement, heads HTS’s “air defence brigade”.
He said the attack was in retaliation for a ferocious bombing campaign by Russian warplanes over Idlib. HTS, which is dominated by al-Qaeda’s former affiliate in Syria, controls Idlib and had sought to fight back a Russian-backed assault by Syrian government troops.
A correspondent, who arrived at the crash site on Saturday, saw what appeared to be the charred remains of the plane, including a wing with a red star still visible.
Firefighters arrived to put out flames that had been spewing smoke into the wintry Syrian sky.
The Russian Defence Ministry confirmed that the Su-25 aircraft was shot down and said the pilot was killed “in fighting against terrorists”.
It added that “according to preliminary reports, the plane was shot down by a portable anti-aircraft missile system”.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the jet was downed near the town here and the pilot parachuted to the ground.
He was killed clashing with rebels as they tried to take him hostage, said the Britain-based Observatory.
In Moscow, the Russian Defence Ministry was quoted as saying by the TASS news agency that a strike from an undisclosed high-precision weapon had killed more than 30 militants in an area of Syria’s Idlib where its warplane was downed.