Iran's Revolutionary Guards announced Tuesday that it had captured a US drone over Gulf waters after it entered Iranian airspace on an intelligence-gathering mission.
"The unmanned US drone patrolling Persian Gulf waters, performing reconnaissance and gathering intelligence , was captured as soon as it entered Iranian airspace," the elite unit's naval forces said in a statement cited by state broadcaster IRIB.
The statement did not say exactly when, where or how the aircraft was captured. It said the drone had been conducting a mission over "the past few days."
In parallel, the Guards' naval force, tasked with guarding Iranian assets in the Gulf, said the drone was a Boeing-made ScanEagle, a short-range surveillance vehicle with a three-meter wingspan that is typically launched from ships and which can fly up to 100 kilometers.
Meanwhile, the commander of the Islamic Revolution Guard Corps [IRGC] Navy Rear Admiral Ali Fadavi announced that his forces hunted the drone.
Fadavi further noted that the IRGC has full intelligence supremacy over the moves of the foreign forces in the Persian Gulf.
It is worth mentioning that ScanEagle is a small, low-cost, long-endurance unmanned aerial vehicle built by Insitu, a subsidiary of Boeing.
Such drones are based on Insitu's Seascan miniature robotic aircraft and draws on Boeing's systems integration, communications and payload technologies.
As standard payload ScanEagle carries either an inertial stabilized electro-optical or an infrared camera. The gimbaled camera allows the operator to easily track both stationary and moving targets, providing real-time intelligence.
Capable of flying above 16,000 feet, the UAV has also demonstrated the ability to provide persistent low-altitude reconnaissance.
The development came exactly a year after Iran announced on December 4, 2011 that its defense forces had downed the aircraft through a sophisticated cyber attack.
The drone was the first such loss by the US. Officials have described the loss of the aircraft in Iran as a setback and a fatal blow to the stealth drone program.
