For the first time Iran’s army has tested a suicide drone able to hit aerial and ground targets, as well as ships.
The unmanned aircraft is “a mobile bomb” that can be used for “hitting aerial and ground targets and can carry out an attack when it identifies a suspicious target,” commander Gen. Ahmad Reza Pourdastan told journalists on Saturday.
Local media reports indicated that the drone is called Yasir. It’s a domestically produced combat drone that was unveiled in September.
He did not provide the name of the drone. The conservative Kayhan daily referred to it as the Yasir, while an online news website called it the Raad. Officials could not be reached for comment.
The Yasir drone, first unveiled last year, can fly for up to 10 hours and carry out 360-degree imaging, officials said at the time. Western military analysts say the Yasir is a modified version of the American ScanEagle drone. Iran said in December 2012 that it had seized at least three Boeing-designed ScanEagle drones after they allegedly violated its airspace over the Persian Gulf.
Yasir is equipped with state-of-art, light cameras for reconnaissance. It can fly for eight hours with a range of 200 kilometers and reach an altitude of 4,500 meters.
The drone was tested as part of a six-day exercise code-named Mohammad Rasoulallah (Mohammad, the Messenger of God) that started on Thursday, involving all branches of Iran’s military.
Iran is believed to have produced its own remotely piloted suicide drone, the Raad-85, which is designed to crash into targets and set off its warhead.
The six-day military exercise is being carried out over 527,000 square kilometers (850,000 square miles) near the Strait of Hormuz, a narrow waterway through which one-fifth of the world’s oil supply passes.
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