Iranian officials deny U.S. military downed its drone

Iranian officials Friday denied that the U.S. military had downed an Iranian drone in the Strait of Hormuz, a day after President Donald Trump and Pentagon officials first made that claim.

A spokesman for the Iranian Armed Forces, in rejecting Trump’s assertion, also said that the “unfounded claim” had been intended to increase tensions in the Persian Gulf, according to Tasnim, an official Iranian news agency.

Pentagon officials Thursday said a small, uncrewed Iranian drone came within “threatening range” of a U.S. Navy ship in the strait, a strategic Persian Gulf waterway that has been a flash point in the simmering conflict between Tehran and Wash- ington.

On Friday, United States officials said they used electronic jamming to bring down the unmanned aircraft, while Iran said it simply didn’t hap- pen.

Neither side provided evidence to prove its claim.

At the White House, Pres- ident Donald Trump said flatly of the Iranian drone: “We shot it down.” But Pentagon and other officials have said repeatedly that the USS Boxer, a Navy ship in the Strait of Hormuz, actually jammed

the drone’s signal, causing it to crash, and did not fire a missile. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive technology.

Trump’s national security adviser, John Bolton, said, “There is no question this was an Iranian drone, and the USS Boxer took it out as the president announced yesterday because it posed a threat to the ship and its crew. It’s entirely the right thing to do.”

In Tehran, the Iranian military said all its drones had returned safely to their bases

and denied there was any confrontation with the USS Boxer, an amphibious assault ship.

“Contrary to the false claim rooted in Trump’s illusions, all unmanned aerial vehi- cles (UAVs) of the Islamic Republic of Iran in the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz have returned safely to their bases after completing their scheduled reconnaissance and patrol missions,” Gen. Abolfazl Shekarchi said in a statement Friday quoted by Tasnim and other Iranian news outlets.

Other Iranian officials offered similar statements, denying the loss of any Iranian drone in the area. On Thursday night — just hours after Trump made the claim of a downed drone — Iran’s foreign minister, Moham- mad Javad Zarif, told reporters at the United Nations that Tehran had “no information about losing a drone.”

Seyed Abbas Araghchi, Iran’s deputy foreign min- ister, said in a Twitter post- ing that, “We have not lost any drone in the Strait of Hormuz nor anywhere else,” before adding that perhaps U.S. forces had shot down

their own drone.

It is not the first time that U.S. and Iranian officials have provided conflicting accounts of an incident involving a drone in the Strait of Hormuz.

Last month, Iranian forces shot down a U.S. surveillance drone in an incident that nearly prompted retaliatory military strikes from the United States.

The United States said the drone — a high-altitude Global Hawk unmanned aircraft — had stayed in international airspace.

Tehran maintained that

the U.S. drone had ventured into airspace 8 miles off the country’s coast, inside the 12 nautical miles from the shore that Iran claims as its territorial waters.

Sanam Vakil, who studies Iran at Chatham House, a research institute in London, said that while the conflicting accounts can be confusing, they are, in her view, part of a strategy by both Tehran and Washington.

Part of the Iranian strategy, she said, “is this policy of plausible deniability about everything, and they are employing it in many ways, whether it’s about the tankers or the missing ship or the drones.”