The plane spent about an hour and a half in Turkish air space but when it had less than a hundred kilometers left to reach the Armenian border, the aircraft was suddenly ordered to return to Macedonia's capital Skopje.
Utrenski Vestnik, a Macedonian daily, wrote on Friday that, to justify its actions, Ankara claimed that "the aircraft crew did not have the documents required for flying over Turkey".
Other Macedonian media assumed that the real cause of the incident lied in strained Turkish-Armenian relations (Yerevan demands that Ankara apologize for the large-scale massacre, branded by Yerevan as genocide against the Armenian population of eastern territories of the Ottoman Turkey in 1915-1917, when up to 1.5 million Armenians were exterminated).
Currently, the Macedonian Soccer Federation is looking for alternative routes (bypassing Turkey) to send its national team to Armenia.
