Iran claims air space violation

Tehran: Iran said on Wednesday unidentified foreign planes violated its air space six times as the country kicked off its biggest-ever air defence drill. Iran said the intruders were intercepted and forced back by Iranian jets.

The remarks by General Hamid Arjangi, a spokesman for the exercise, were the first Iranian claim of an intrusion. Initially, he had only said that foreign reconnaissance planes had approached Iran's air space.

Arjangi said Iran's radar stations and observation posts picked up on the planes entering Iranian air space during the five-day drill, which started on Tuesday.

"There were six cases of intrusion by unidentified planes into the country," Arjangi was quoted as saying by the official Irna news agency. "In all six cases, Air Force jet fighters took off and carried out interception operations ... artillery systems were alerted, targets were identified and necessary warnings were given."

The Iranian exercise is meant to showcase the country's capabilities in defending its nuclear facilities from possible attack.

Nuclear facilities

It followed an announcement by the Iranian Air Force saying its troops, earlier this year, had conducted an exercise at several facilities — from the uranium enrichment plant at Natanz, the under-construction enrichment site at Fordo, to the nuclear conversion facility near Isfahan and the Bushehr nuclear power plant.

Arjangi said thousands of watchers have been stationed along 7,000km of Iran's border, equipped with sophisticated communication systems capable of countering enemy jamming devices to transfer data to control command centres. He did not specify whether the figure, which is only a segment of the total Iranian borderline, referred to that in the Arabian Gulf.

General Ahmad Mighani, head of an air force unit in charge of responding to threats to Iran's air space, said on Tuesday the war games seek to "upgrade the combat preparedness" of the country's air defence system.

The US and its European allies accuse Iran of embarking on a nuclear weapons programme. Iran denies the charge and insists the programme is only for peaceful purposes.