A Syrian regime military plane crashed in Turkey near its border with Syria, the Turkish state-run news agency Anadolu said.

The plane crashed in the Turkish province of Hatay on Saturday, the news agency said, quoting provincial governor Erdal Ata as saying police and medical teams were at the crash site.

"The plane's cockpit was empty. We believe that the pilots parachuted out," Ata said, adding that a search for them was under way.

On Sunday, Anadolu reported that the pilot was found and taken to hospital, adding that he had managed to use his parachute to land safely.

He was found exhausted after a nine-hour search by Turkish security teams and was being given medical care at a local medical centre.

Earlier, people in the Turkish border village of Samandag said they heard a loud noise at around 6:30pm (1530 GMT) and alerted the police, the Dogan news agency said.

A Syrian regime military official, quoted by state television, said: "Contact was lost with a military aircraft on a reconnaissance mission near the Turkish border."

The Syrian opposition group Ahrar al-Sham told AFP news agency that it had shot down a regime plane "as it was overflying Idlib province [in northwestern Syria] and carrying out air strikes".

The British-based monitor of the Syrian conflict, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, said a plane "which probably belongs to the Syrian regime crashed in Idlib province. The status of the pilot is unknown and there are contradictory reasons for the cause of the crash."

Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim, quoted by Anadolu, said the cause of the crash was unknown, but he pointed to poor weather conditions at the time.

The Syrian war started as a largely unarmed uprising against Bashar al-Assad in March 2011, but quickly developed into a fully armed conflict.

Staffan de Mistura, the United Nations special envoy to Syria, estimated in April 2016 that more than 400,000 Syrians had been killed since the war started.

Calculating a precise death toll is difficult, partially owing to the forced disappearances of tens of thousands of Syrians whose fate remains unknown.

Almost 11 million Syrians - half the country's prewar population - have been displaced from their homes.

PHOTO CAPTION

Map locating Turkey and Syria

Al-Jazeera