BEIRUT (AP) — Turkey confirmed that it shot down a Russian warplane Tuesday claiming it violated Turkish airspace and ignored warnings.

Russia confirms the plane crashed but insists that it was only flying over Syria.

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has convened a security meeting following Turkey’s downing of a Russian plane.

Erdogan is meeting with Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu as well as Turkey’s military and intelligence chiefs on Tuesday.

Turkey says the Russian plane violated Turkish airspace and repeatedly ignored Turkish warnings to leave. Moscow says the plane was inside Syria when it was shot down.

Syrian rebels and activists say they have targeted and destroyed a Russian-made helicopter operated by the Syrian army near the area where a Russian warplane was downed by Turkey.

A rebel spokesman, Zakaria al-Ahmad, says the chopper was flying low over mountains in Latakia province, allegedly searching for the missing Russian pilots on Tuesday.

Al-Ahmad says the rebels fired a Tao missile that destroyed the helicopter after it landed and its pilots had left the aircraft.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the chopper made an emergency landing in the area and its pilots ejected before the aircraft was hit. It was not clear why it made an emergency landing.

Turkey’s private Dogan news agency is quoting a Turkmen commander as saying Turkey brought down the Russian plane after it had dropped a bomb in a Turkmen region of Syria and entered Turkish airspace.

The fighter, who was identified as Alpaslan Celik, the second-in-command of the Turkmen Coastal Division, said the Turkmen forces had re-captured a Turkmen mountain region from Syrian forces.

Celik also said the rebels shot and killed both Russian pilots who parachuted from the plane after it was shot down.

The rebels had previously said they killed one of the two pilots and were searching for the second one. The AP couldn’t immediately confirm the claim that both pilots were dead.

Dogan said Celik spoke to a group of Turkish journalists in the Turkmen region. A group of fighters could be seen in the background shouting “Allahu Akbar” and firing into the sky with machine guns as Celik made the announcement.

Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova says Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has cancelled a planned trip to Turkey in the wake of the downing of a Russian warplane by Turkey.

The meeting between Lavrov and his Turkish counterpart had been scheduled for Wednesday.

Lavrov was quoted by news agency Interfax as saying that President Vladimir Putin “directly said that (the downing) cannot but affect Russian-Turkish relations. In this regard, it decided to cancel the meeting, which was planned for tomorrow.”

Syria’s information minister says the shooting down of a Russian warplane is a “new crime” that will be added to the record of insurgent groups fighting in Syria and the countries that finance and arm them.

Omran al-Zoubi specified Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar — countries that have been among the strongest backers of insurgent groups trying to remove President Bashar Assad from power.

Turkey shot down a Russian warplane on Tuesday, accusing it of violating Turkish airspace. Moscow says the plane was inside Syria when it was shot down.

One of Russia’s largest travel agencies says it will suspend selling package tours to Turkey as of Wednesday, citing security concerns.

Natali Tours said in a statement Tuesday its offices in Russia and former Soviet republics would stop sending tourists to Turkey due to “an unstable political situation.”

It also cited Putin’s decree that suspended flights earlier this month to Egypt on security concerns in the aftermath of the Oct. 31 plane crash over the Sinai peninsula.

Nearly 4.5 million Russians visited Turkey last year, 12 percent of all tourists there, second only to Germany.

Czech leaders say a lack of a common strategy and proper cooperation of all the players involved in the Syrian conflict are to blame for the downing of a Russian warplane by Turkey.

Foreign Minister Lubomir Zaoralek says: “Because there’s not a clear agreement of the international community on a common strategy and because the enemy is not clearly defined, everyone fights a war in their own interest and we can end up fighting each other.”