PRESS RELEASE
Gareth Porter: Turkey Shoot-Down of Russian Jet Pre-Planned Ambsush
Dec. 1, 2015 (EIRNS)—Data is now available to support Russian President Putin’s charge that the Turkish shoot-down of the Russian Su-24 jet on Nov. 24 was a pre-planned "ambush," investigative journalist Gareth Porter wrote in anti-war.com yesterday. Two key pieces of evidence have emerged in support of that view, Porter says.
"The central Turkish claim that its F-16 pilots had warned the two Russian aircraft 10 times during a period of five minutes actually is the primary clue that Turkey was not telling the truth about the shoot-down,"
Porter writes.
The Russian Su-24 was flying at a low-altitude cruising speed of 870 mph when hit, as confirmed by the navigator of the second plane. Close analysis of both the Turkish and Russian images of the radar path of the Russian jets indicates that the earliest point at which either of the Russian planes was on a path that might have been misinterpreted as going into Turkish airspace was roughly 16 miles from the Turkish border—meaning it was only one minute and 20 second away from the border. Furthermore, according to both versions of the flight plan, five minutes before the shoot-down, the Russian planes would have been flying eastward—away from the Turkish border.
If the Turkish pilots actually had begun warning the Russian jets five minutes before the shootdown, they were doing so long before the planes were even headed in the general direction of the small projection of the Turkish border in the Northern Latakia province. In order to carry out the air-to-air missile strike, the Turkish pilots would have had to be in the air already, and prepared to strike as soon as they knew the Russian jets were airborne. So, the Turkish evidence, itself, points to the fact that the decision to shoot down the Russian jet was made before the Russian jets even began their flight.
