Clone of captured US spy drone being built, claims Tehran
Iran has claimed it was building a copy of US spy drone it had captured in December last year.
"The Americans should be aware to what extent we have infiltrated the plane," military aerospace chief General Amir Ali Hajizadeh said Sunday.
"Our experts have full understanding of its components and programmes," Hajizadeh said in a claim outrightly rejected by the US.
Senator Joe Lieberman, a member of the Armed Services Committee, dismissed the claim saying it was an "Iranian bluster". "They're on the defensive because of our economic sanctions against them," he said in reference to Western embargoes to thwart Tehran's nuclear programme.
The RQ-170 US spy drone that had invaded Iranian airspace was shown on Iranian state television last December.
It was brought down by Iran by breaking encryption code even as Washington said it malfunctioned before being captured.
Iran also claimed it had recovered data from the captured drone extracting information that the aircraft was used to spy on Al Qaeda Osama bin Laden weeks before he was killed in Pakistan.
Iran earlier made a copy of the plane as a simple toy and sent it to the US in a joking response to demands to hand over the aircraft.
Washington has long said that Iran couldn't exploit any data and technology of the plane because its intelligence value had been limited for operations over hostile territory.
The media in Tehran say it has now completed reverse-engineering the drone and begun building its own.
Iran last week claimed that many nations, including China and Russia, had approached it over the possibility of sharing military technology developed while studying the drone.
Source: Middle East News.Net
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