Iran Press/ Iran news: Tehran's interim Friday Prayers leader Hojjatoleslam Mohammad Javad Haj Ali Akbari blasted the US for violating Iran's airspace, saying: Iran will bury the US intruders in its Southern territorial waters, according to Fars News Agency.
Addressing a large and fervent congregation of the people in Tehran on Friday, Hojjatoleslam Haj Ali Akbari said, "The Strait of Hormuz belongs to Iran and Iran's Armed Forces will turn it into a graveyard for any aggressor."
The senior cleric, meantime, lauded the downing of the US drone by the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) Aerospace Force, and said, "The United States has a long history of human rights violations against Iran."
Hojjatoleslam Haj Ali Akbari reiterated that the drone had sneaked into Iran's airspace and territorial waters.
He further condemned the US authorities’ claim that their drone had been flying over international waters, ridiculing the last night meeting at the White House on the incident for its insistence on the wrong claim.
The IRGC had announced in a statement early Thursday that the US-made Global Hawk surveillance drone was brought down by its Air Force near the Kouh-e Mobarak region in the Central district of Jask after the aircraft violated Iran's airspace.
The RQ-4 Global Hawk unmanned aircraft system (UAS) can fly at high altitudes for more than 30 hours, gathering near-real-time, high-resolution imagery of large areas of land in all types of weather.
Meantime, a US official said a US Navy MQ-4C Triton high-altitude drone was shot down by Iranian surface-to-air missile.
The Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) issued a second statement on Thursday disclosing details about the shooting down of the US spy drone near the Strait of Hormuz, stressing that the unmanned aircraft was targeted after violating Iran's airspace over the Southern coasts.
"The Global Hawk spy drone took off from one of the US forces' bases South of the Persian Gulf at 00:14 am today and turned off all its Identification (Identification Friend or Foe) equipment and continued flight from the Strait of Hormuz to Chabahar port in a full stealth mode," the statement said on Thursday noon after the IRGC declared in an earlier statement that it had shot down the drone at dawn.
"The drone started collecting intel in a spying operation when it was returning towards the Western parts of the region near the Strait of Hormuz and it violated the airspace over the Islamic Republic of Iran's territory," it added. 208/213
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