Judicial documents revealed that the commander of the Turkish Air Force issued a direct order to shoot down the Russian plane over the Turkish-Syrian border in 2015.
The documents, published by the Swedish website Nordic Monitor, on Saturday, stated that the Turkish pilot knew that he was shooting at a Russian warplane over the Turkish-Syrian border, when the commander of the Air Force, General Abidin Onal, ordered him to shoot the plane at that time.
In his testimony before the court on August 15, 2017, Colonel Ali Darmoush, 45, said that the Air Force Command informed Onal that two Russian planes had violated Turkish airspace over the Syrian border area on November 24, 2015, and requested instructions, According to the same documents.
Darmoush continued: "Onal ordered the Turkish planes to fire on the Russian planes, which led to the downing of a Russian Sukhoi Su-24M plane near the meeting place of the Turkish provinces of Hatay and the Syrian Latakia in the mountainous terrain.Unal was not an ordinary general in the Air Force. Unlike his predecessors, he had a close relationship with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, with whom he used to meet secretly without the knowledge of the then Chief of the General Staff, General Hulusi Akar.
When Unal gave the order to strike the Russian plane, he knew that he was carrying out Erdogan's wishes.
It appears that the air force commander's order to shoot down the Russian plane was a victory for the government as well as Chief of the General Staff Akar, who personally visited the air base to congratulate the downed pilot, according to Nordic Monitor.
As Turkish military documents revealed, the main role played by the Turkish president in shooting down the Russian plane in 2015.
According to the briefing notes presented by Turkey at a meeting of a former NATO alliance to brief members on the legal side of the downing of the Russian plane, Erdogan said that “every soldier who approaches Turkey through the Syrian border and poses a security risk and threat will be assessed as a threat.” military and treated as a military objective.”
Although Erdogan and other Turkish leaders defied the Russian threats at first, threatening to do the same thing again if another violation occurred, they later moderated the rhetoric.
In the wake of the agreement between Moscow and Ankara regarding the rapprochement, members of the ruling Justice and Development Party in Turkey began to claim that the government did not order the Turkish Air Force to shoot down the Russian plane, but rather asserted that the pilots acted on their own, and the pilots were accused of shooting down the Russian plane on their own initiative, They were arrested following the alleged coup attempt on July 15, 2016.
Unal retired from the military in 2017 after playing a role in the 2016 fake coup attempt in close coordination with the Turkish intelligence agency, and left the air force crippled by the mass purge of fighter pilots that caused a major shortage of pilots in NATO's second largest army. In terms of human power.
While Erdogan's government imprisoned Ali Darmoush on trumped-up charges in the alleged coup, and 79 life sentences were issued against him, at the end of sham trials that concluded in November 2020.