Friday November 8, 2019
Iranian forces shot down a drone belonging to a foreign country on Friday, state news agency IRNA reported, quoting an Iranian official.
“The downed drone definitely belonged to a foreign country. Its wreckage has been recovered and is being investigated,” the governor of Iran’s southern Khuzestan province, Gholamreza Shariati, said, according to IRNA.
Iranian media earlier reported that the army had shot down a drone over the Gulf port city of Mahshahr in Khuzestan province, without providing further details.
The official and Iranian news outlets did not say whether it was a military or civilian drone, or from which country it came.
There was no immediate comment from the United States.
Iran’s arch-foe Israel declined to comment on the incident, with a spokeswoman for the Israeli military saying: “We do not comment on reports from the foreign media”.
Iran’s semi-official Tasnim news agency said the drone “downed over Iran’s airspace with the army’s domestically made Mersad surface-to-air missile”.
Iran’s Arabic-Language al-Alam TV channel said: “Residents of Imam Khomeini port city heard the sound of a missile being fired on Friday morning”.
In June, Iran shot down an unmanned U.S. surveillance drone, which the Revolutionary Guards said was flying over southern Iran. Washington said the U.S. drone had been shot down by Iran in international airspace over the Strait of Hormuz in the Gulf.
Relations between Iran and the United States have worsened since last year when President Donald Trump pulled out of Tehran’s 2015 nuclear deal with world powers and reimposed sanctions on the country.
Israel says it has carried out hundreds of air strikes in neighboring Syria, some of them against Iranian targets, to prevent Tehran from establishing a presence there.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hinted in August of possible Israeli involvement in attacks on Iranian-backed militia positions in Iraq.