A Turkish military prosecutor's office says an investigation has found that a Turkish military jet that crashed off Syria in June was hit by a missile by Syrian forces while it was flying in international airspace.

The General Staff's Military Prosecutor's Office on Wednesday released the findings of an investigation launched into the downing of the jet. According to the military, the jet went down after a missile launched by Syrian air forces hit its left back section while it was flying over the eastern Mediterranean.

The RF-4E Phantom, an unarmed reconnaissance jet, crashed off the Syrian coast on June 22 amid tensions between Turkey and Syria over Syria's brutal crackdown to suppress an anti-regime uprising. Syrian authorities claimed responsibility for downing the jet immediately following the incident but defended the action, saying that the Syrian air defense was forced to react immediately to a Turkish jet flying low at 100 meters (330 feet) inside Syrian airspace in what was “a clear breach of Syrian sovereignty.” Syria also said the plane was downed by anti-aircraft fire, rather than by a missile, well within its airspace.

Turkey, on the other hand, maintained that the plane was shot down by a missile outside of Syrian airspace - 13 miles off the Syrian coast - when it was on a solo mission to test domestic radar systems. The government has promised that the Syrian “hostile act” will not go unpunished, and the military sent air defense systems to the Syrian border after Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said any Syrian military units approaching the border would be treated as hostile.

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