Iran shot down some manner of drone over the southern port city of Mahshahr on Friday, state news agency IRNA said.
Apparently, it wasn’t supposed to be where it was.
“The downed drone definitely belonged to a foreign country”, the governor of Iran’s southern Khuzestan province said. “Its wreckage has been recovered and is being investigated”.
This comes at a time when the Iranians have ratcheted up tensions with the US materially. Tehran this week announced plans to inject uranium gas into centrifuges buried in Fordow, the secretive mountain facility which ignited an international incident in 2009, when its existence was unveiled.
Read more: Iran Now ‘Harassing’ IAEA Inspectors As Mountain Nuke Facility Reactivated
Iran also detained and “harassed” an IAEA inspector. Iranian ambassador Kazem Gharibabadi later “explained” that “a special chemical detector that can find a range of explosive materials” went off during a security check at Natanz. “[She] then sneaked off” to the toilet, he said. “There was no doubt that suspicious material was involved”.
You can write your own jokes (depending on how funny you find nuclear proliferation).
Friday’s drone incident may or may not turn out to be “news”, but in light of this week’s events and the fact that the US and Iran downed each other’s drones (here and here) earlier this year as tensions flared, it’s worth mentioning.
According to the Arabic-Language al-Alam channel, “residents of Imam Khomeini port city heard the sound of a missile being fired on Friday morning”.
IRNA news said the drone was downed in the “early morning”, but didn’t say whether it was a military or a commercially available craft.
