YEREVAN:
A Turkish F-16 fighter jet shot down an Armenian SU-25 warplane over Armenian territory on Tuesday, killing the pilot, an Armenian defence ministry spokeswoman said.
Shushan Stepanyan, an Armenian defence ministry spokeswoman, wrote on her Facebook page that the plane had been on a military assignment when it was shot down.
Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan, however, said on Monday Armenia must immediately withdraw from territory, he said it was occupying in Azerbaijan, and it was time to end a crisis over the breakaway region after clashes between Azeri and Armenian forces.
Dozens have been reported killed and hundreds wounded since clashes between Azerbaijan and its ethnic Armenian mountain enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh broke out on Sunday in a new eruption of a decades-old conflict.
In a sign that fighting was spreading, Armenia’s foreign ministry reported the first death in Armenia proper - a civilian it said was killed in an Azeri attack in the town of Vardenis more than 20 km (12 miles) from Nagorno-Karabakh.
The Armenian defence ministry said an Armenian civilian bus caught fire in the town after being hit by an Azeri drone. It was not clear if the reported civilian death was from that incident.
Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev said 10 civilians had been killed by Armenian shelling since Sunday. There was no official information about casualties among Azeri servicemen.
Nagorno-Karabakh is a breakaway region that is inside Azerbaijan but is run by ethnic Armenians and is supported by Armenia. It broke away from Azerbaijan in a war in the 1990s, but is not recognised by any country as an independent republic.
An all-out war could drag in major regional powers Russia and Turkey. Moscow has a defence alliance with Armenia, which is the enclave’s lifeline to the outside world, while Ankara backs its own ethnic Turkic kin in Azerbaijan.
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