Iran claims capture of US drone
Revolutionary Guards say ScanEagle drone entered Iranian airspace but US navy says that none of its drones is missing
Shiv Malik and agencies
Iran's Revolutionary Guards have captured a US drone flying over the country's airspace, state media have reported.
The Fars news agency said on Tuesday the Boeing-made ScanEagle drone was gathering information over Gulf waters when it entered Iranian airspace and was subsequently captured by a naval unit of the Revolutionary Guards.
General Ali Fadavi, the Guards' navy chief, was quoted as saying the "intruding" drone was in Iran's possession.
"The US drone, which was conducting a reconnaissance flight and gathering data over the Persian Gulf in the past few days, was captured by the Guards' navy air defence unit as soon as it entered Iranian airspace," Fadavi said. "Such drones usually take off from large warships."
However, the US navy said that none of its drones was missing. "The US navy has fully accounted for all unmanned air vehicles (UAV) operating in the Middle East region. Our operations in the Gulf are confined to internationally recognised water and air space," a US navy spokesman in Bahrain said.
"We have no record that we have lost any ScanEagles recently."
If true, the seizure of the drone would be the third reported incident involving Iran and US drones in the past year.
Last month, Iran claimed a US drone had violated its airspace. The Pentagon said the unmanned Predator aircraft came under fire at least twice but was not hit and that it was over international waters.
In April this year, Iran claimed it had copied technology from a US drone brought down in December 2011 on its eastern borders with Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Tehran said it recovered data from the RQ-170 Sentinel, a top-secret drone equipped with stealth technology. As proof, Iranian military cited the drone's flight log, saying it had flown over Osama bin Laden's Pakistani hideout two weeks before he was killed by US special forces.
After acknowledging the loss of the drone, US sources said their software was encrypted and of little intelligence value.
The US blamed the loss of the RQ-170 Sentinel drone on a technical problem, while Iran claimed it brought it down electronically by disrupting its GPS system.
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