Iran’s Revolutionary Guard on Monday said it has decoded all of the data from an advanced CIA unmanned surveillance aircraft captured last year.
The Guard’s aerospace chief, General Ami Ali Hajizadeh, told state-run Press TV that that the RQ-170 Sentinel craft had not carried out missions over nuclear facilities before it went down in December 2011 near the eastern border with Afghanistan.
Tehran had previously said it recovered information from the top-secret stealth aircraft, but Monday’s announcement suggests technicians may have broken encryptions.
“All data from the aircraft have been completely decoded. We know where it travelled step by step,” Hajizadeh was quoted as saying. “After decoding, our experts discovered that this aircraft had not carried out even a single nuclear mission over Iran.”
Hajizadeh said Iran had captured the aircraft and decoded its data without any assistance, including from its allies China and Russia. Iran has said it would reverse-engineer it and build its own version.
Source: Kansa City Star