Tehran building US drone copy

Tehran: Iran said Sunday that it had reverse-engineered an American spy drone captured by its armed forces last year and has begun building a copy.

General Amir Ali Hajizadeh, chief of the aerospace division of the powerful Revolutionary Guards, related what he said were details of the aircraft's operational history to prove his claim that Tehran's military experts had extracted data from the US RQ-170 Sentinel captured in December in eastern Iran, state television reported yesterday.

Tehran has flaunted the capture of the Sentinel, a top-secret surveillance drone with stealth technology, as a victory for Iran and a defeat for the United States in a complicated intelligence and technological battle.

US officials have acknowledged losing the drone.

They have said Iran will find it hard to exploit any data and technology aboard it because of measures taken to limit the intelligence value of drones operating over hostile territory.

Hajizadeh told state television that the captured surveillance drone is a "national asset" for Iran and that he could not reveal full technical details. But he did provide some samples of the data that he claimed Iranian experts had recovered. "This drone was in California in October 2010 for some technical work and was taken to Kandahar in Afghanistan in November 2010. It conducted flights there but apparently faced problems and (US experts) were unable to fix it," he said.

Hajizadeh said the drone was taken to Los Angeles in December 2010 where sensors of the aircraft underwent testing. He claimed that the drone was in use in Pakistan two weeks before Al Qaida chief Osama Bin Laden was killed by US Navy SEALs in the country's northwest.

"If we had not achieved access to software and hardware of this aircraft, we would be unable to get these details. Our experts are fully dominant over sections and programmes of this plane," he said.

‘Bluster'

Influential US Senator Joe Lieberman swiftly dismissed the general's remarks as "Iranian bluster."

"There is some history here of Iranian bluster particularly now when they're on the defensive because of our economic sanctions against them," said Lieberman, an independent who chairs the Senate Homeland Security Committee.