Erdogan: Aegean incident with Greece ended peacefully

By Ilkay Guder

ANKARA (AA) – Turkey’s president said on Tuesday that last night’s incident between Turkish and Greek boats in the Aegean was concluded without any problem.

“From the beginning, we told the Greek side ‘Don’t do such things and also don’t get us in trouble. Let’s stop these skirmishes in both the air and the water’,” Recep Tayyip Erdogan told reporters in the capital Ankara about the incident off the Kardak islets.

“When they didn’t stop, our soldiers did their duty,” he said. “Such a thing happened last night again. It was finished without any problem.”

According to Greek news agency AMNA, a Turkish patrol boat rammed into a Greek Coast Guard patrol boat near the Kardak islets in the southeastern Aegean.

Last month, the Turkish Coast Guard blocked Greece’s defense minister from approaching the same Turkish islets to lay a wreath there.

A decades-long dispute between Turkey and Greece over the uninhabited Aegean islets brought the two countries to the brink of armed conflict in 1996.