Iran said Wednesday that unidentified foreign planes violated its air space six times as the country kicked off its biggest ever air defense drill but that the intruders were intercepted and forced back by Iranian jets.
The remarks by Gen. 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.
Gen. Arjangi said Iran's radar stations and observation posts picked up on the planes entering Iranian airspace during the five-day drill, which started 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."
Arjangi said thousands of surveillance outposts have been stationed along 4,400 miles (7,000 kilometers) of Iran's border, equipped with sophisticated communication systems capable of countering enemy jamming to transfer data to control command centers. He did not specify whether the figure, which is only a segment of the total Iranian borderline, referred to that in the Persian Gulf. |