Iran claims it has proof US drone invaded airspace
Revolutionary Guards Deputy commander's comments come after Pentagon says Iran fired on US drone in int'l airspace.
By JOANNA PARASZCZUKUS Navy RQ-4 Global Hawk drone 370 (R)(photo credit: Reuters / Handout)
A senior commander in Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps said Sunday that Iran had documents to prove that a US drone had entered Iranian airspace.IRGC deputy commander Brig.-Gen. Hossein Salami’s comments came a week after Pentagon officials announced that Iranian Su-25 fighter jets had fired on an unarmed US Predator drone on November 1, as it conducted what they said was routine surveillance in international airspace east of Kuwait, 26 kilometers off the coast of Iran.Salami was responding to questions regarding whether the drone had been in international airspace as the US had claimed, or whether it had entered Iranian airspace when the IRGC air force repelled it.The IRGC commander said that the documents proved that Iran’s air force had not conducted any act of aggression against any aircraft in international airspace.Iran was aware of international law regarding “incursions from alien aircraft,” Salami added.“Certainly if the situation had been otherwise we would never have fired [at the drone],” Salami was quoted as saying by Mashregh News, a website close to the IRGC.The drone incident comes almost a year after Iran reported that it had captured a US-operated Lockheed Martin RQ-170 Sentinel drone that had crashed in Iran. In April, IRGC officials said they had managed to reverse engineer technologies from the drone and were building a copy.
