Jordan has granted political asylum to a Syrian pilot who flew his fighter plane to the kingdom today, Minister of State for Information Samih al-Maaytah said.
The pilot flew over the border and landed his plane at the King Hussein air base near Syria's southern border with Jordan, the first such defection since the start of the uprising against Syrian president Bashar al-Assad.
The Syrian Defence Ministry said the pilot who defected with his MiG-21 fighter jet was a "traitor" and that it was in contact with Jordanian authorities to retrieve the aircraft.
"The pilot is considered a deserter from service and a traitor to his country and his military honour. Contacts are under way with the Jordanian side to make arrangements to return the plane," a statement by the ministry said.
Syrian state television named the pilot who defected as Colonel Hassan Hamada. Communications were lost with his plane while he was on a training mission near the border with Jordan, it said.
Opposition sources said Col Hamada is a 44-year-old Sunni Muslim from Idlib province and he had smuggled his family to Turkey before his dramatic defection.
His hometown Kfar Takharim has been repeatedly shelled in the past several months and suffered intense artillery and helicopter bombardments in the last few days, opposition campaigners who spoke to his family said.
Many airforce personnel and well as army soldiers are from Syria's Sunni majority, although intelligence and senior officers are largely Alawite, the minority sect to which Assad and his family belong and which forms their powerbase.
The defection will boost the morale of the rebel movement fighting Assad at a time when government forces are intensifying efforts to crush the uprising and international peace efforts are stalled.Thousands of soldiers have deserted government ranks in the 15 months since the revolt broke out and they now form the backbone of the rebel army.
But unlike last year's uprisings in Libya and Yemen, no members of Assad's inner circle have broken with him.
Elsewhere today, the Syrian army maintained its bombardment of downtown areas of Homs even though a temporary truce had been agreed to allow aid workers to evacuate the sick and wounded.
The International Committee of the Red Cross said its aid workers had been forced to turn back on the way into Hom's old city because of shooting but would try again later in the day.