A United States surveillance drone, which Iranian officials described as “radar-evading”, took off from a base in the Afghan city of Kandahar and entered Iranian airspace briefly before being given a “serious warning” which quickly caused the drone to return to Afghanistan.
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Tasnim gave no details on how the Iranian authorities had warned the unmanned drone to leave its airspace.
With the use of Nazir, no stealth aircraft will be able to intrude into Iran’s airspace, Esmaili was quoted as saying.
The homegrown radar is particularly employed to detect targets with pretty small cross-section areas, American jet Lockheed U-2, and drones like General Atomics MQ-1 Predator and Northrop Grumman RQ-4 Global Hawk, he added.
It is indicated in the report that the plane originated from a military base in Kandahar, Afghanistan and infiltrated 20 kilometers inside the Iranian border until it received a warning from the Iranian aerial defense system.
In 2014, Iran said it had successfully tested its own version of a US-made drone based on one it had captured. Gen. Amir Ali Hajizadeh, the aerospace commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), said IRGC’s experts were recovering data from the drone.
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The incidents all occurred in the Persian Gulf on Wednesday, a day after another encounter in which a group of Iranian naval vessels with their weapons uncovered sped close to two US Navy guided-missile destroyers.
