Medal for the failure

Two Turkish pilots, who shot down the Russian Su-24 Russian bomber in November last year, were detained in the case of an attempt by a military coup. The AFP message, made with reference to a certain Turkish official, quotes Al Arabiya.

The names of the detainees are not specified.

The involvement of one of the pilots who shot down the Su-24, to the coup, said on Saturday the mayor of Ankara Melikh Gökchek. According to the politician, the military belonged to the organization of the preacher Fathullah Gulen, known as the “deep state” or “parallel state”. It was this organization, according to the Turkish authorities, that stood beyond the attempt of the coup.

“It was the“ parallel state ”that ruined our relations with Russia,” said Gokochk. “It was an incident in which one of the pilots of this structure participated, I was absolutely sure. He was one of the participants in the coup.”

Su-24, bombing in the north of Syria, the positions of local Turkmen, was shot down on November 24 with a rocket from the Turkish F-16, when he violated the boundaries of the airspace of Turkey. The Russian pilots were baptized, but the commander of the aircraft Oleg Peshkov was shot by Turkmen rebels from the ground.

The incident led to a sharp deterioration in Russian-Turkish relations, which normalized only at the end of June, when Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan expressed regret in connection with the death of the aircraft .

The responsibility for the execution of Peshkov was taken by the Turkish citizen Alparslan Chelik, who participated in the battles on the side of the Turkmen as the commander of the 2nd Primorsky Division of the Turkmandagi Mountains. At the end of March, he was detained in Izmir on charges of fraud and illegal weapons. At the end of last month, the court extended the arrest of Chelik until June 2017.

When suppressing the coup in Turkey on July 15-16, 104 of its participants were killed. More than 190 opponents of the putsch were also killed, and over 1,400 were injured.