Iran announced on June 20, 2019 to have shot down an “American spy drone”.
Donald Trump was initially threatening after Iran shot down an American military drone. But he immediately tried to lower the tension.
“Our country will not accept that, I can tell you . ” US President Donald Trump was initially threatening after Iran shot down an American military drone . But he immediately tried to lower the tension, evoking the trail of an error on the Iranian side made by someone “stupid” . “I can not believe it was deliberate,” he said from the Oval Office.
According to the New York Times quoting senior US military officials , Donald Trump initially approved strikes against “a handful of Iranian targets, such as radars and batteries of missiles,” in retaliation, before changing his mind. The White House and the Pentagon declined to comment on this information.
The United States on Thursday night banned the flights of US airlines in the area where Iran shot down the drone. It is thus forbidden to fly over the airspace controlled by Tehran over the Gulf and the Gulf of Oman “until further notice,” said the US Federal Aviation Administration.
These restrictions are justified by an “increase in military activities and increasing political tension in the region, which pose a risk to US civil aviation operations”accompanied by a risk of “mis-identification” , added the same source that mentions the US military drone shot down by an Iranian surface-to-air missile.
Iran’s top diplomat Mohammad Javad Zarif said pieces of the plane had been found in Iran’s territorial waters “where he was shot . ” The drone “was hit at 4:05 (1:35 Paris time) by 25 ° 59’43 north latitude and 57 ° 02’25” (east longitude), he tweeted.
The Pentagon, for its part, claimed that it was 34 km from the Iranian coast and had “at no time” violated Iran’s airspace.
The Pentagon has published in the evening a map of the trajectory of the drone, which shows it in international or Omani waters, but never in Iranian waters. The document also presents a photograph of a burning device at 23:39 GMT (Paris, 1h39) at 25 ° 57’42 N latitude and 56 ° 58’22 E longitude.
In particular, there is a difference of four minutes in the schedule given by the two countries.
According to the US Central Command, the drone was shot down by an Iranian surface-to-air missile over the Strait of Hormuz. This strait is a strategic point of passage for the world’s supply of oil, near which two tankers were attacked on June 13 , about a month after sabotage against four ships at the entrance to the Gulf.