admincaptured by Iranian armed forces, but said it is not hopeful that Iran will comply.
President Barack Obama said the US wants the top-secret aircraft back. “We have asked for it back. We’ll see how the Iranians respond,” Obama said during a White House news conference with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki on Monday.
In an interview broadcast live on Monday night on Venezuelan state television, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said nothing to suggest his country would grant the US request.
“The Americans have perhaps decided to give us this spy plane,” Ahmadinejad said.
“We now have control of this plane.”
Speaking through an interpreter, Ahmadinejad said: “There are people here who have been able to control this spy plane, who can surely analyse this plane’s system also . . . In any case, now we have this spy plane.”
He added, “Very soon, they’re going to learn more about the abilities and possibilities of our country.”
Yesterday, a semi-official Iranian news agency said authorities have shrugged off the US request. Defence Minister Gen Ahmad Vahidi said the United States should apologise for invading Iranian air space instead of asking for the return of the unmanned aircraft.
Obama wouldn’t comment on what the Iranians might learn from studying the downed aircraft. Defence Secretary Leon Panetta said it’s difficult to know “just frankly how much they’re going to be able to get from having obtained those parts.”
Former Vice President Dick Cheney yesterday called the downing of the drone “a significant intelligence loss.”
“For us to go in and take out the drone that crashed, I think, would have been a fairly simple operation,” he said on CBS’s “The Early Show.” But Cheney said the administration “basically limited itself to saying please give it back.” Iran TV reported earlier Monday that Iranian experts were in the final stages of recovering data from the RQ-170 Sentinel, which went down in Iran earlier this month. Tehran has cited the capture as a victory for Iran and displayed the nearly intact drone on state TV. Meanwhile, another US drone crashed yesterday at Seychelles international airport on the main island of Mahe, the US embassy said.
The remote-piloted MQ-9 aircraft crashed on landing but no one was hurt, said the US embassy in Mauritius, which also handles the Seychelles. The drone was operating from the Seychelles, it said. – AP/AFP.
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