Iran’s security forces are mounting missiles on it’s independently produced long-range UAS, a top Iranian official said on Sunday, adding that Iran managed to obtain technical information from the RQ-170that was captured by the Islamic Republic late last year.
In 2010, Iran unveiled a prototype long-range unmanned bomber, with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad saying at the time that Iran should seek the ability to make preemptive strikes against a perceived threat, although he said it would never strike first.
According to a report in Iran’s state-run television network Press TV on Sunday, Iranian forces have already included the Karrar in the recent Prophet 7 military drill that took place in July.
Speaking to Press TV, Iran’s deputy defense minister Mohammad Eslami indicated that the now active craft was also being fitted with weapons, saying that according to the Defense Ministry’s “plans, we are currently mounting missiles on these UAS.”
In addition, the report also cited Eslami as claiming Iran was able to obtain what the report said “valuable technical information” from U.S. RQ-170 stealth UAS.
In April, a senior Iranian commander said the country has reverse-engineered the American aircrafte captured by Tehran’s armed forces and has begun building a copy.
General Amir Ali Hajizadeh, is Chief of the Aerospace Division of the powerful Revolutionary Guards, was quoted by the semi-official Mehr news agency as saying that experts are also recovering data from the U.S. RQ-170 Sentinel captured in December in eastern Iran.
Source: Haaretz