TEHRAN, Iran — Iranian warplanes fired shots at a U.S. drone last week but only after the unmanned aircraft had entered Iranian airspace, Iran’s defense minister said Friday.
The assertions by the defense minister, Brig. Gen. Ahmad Vahidi, were Iran’s first acknowledgment of the episode. He spoke less than 24 hours after the Pentagon first disclosed the shooting, which involved two Iranian jet fighters and the U.S. aircraft, a Predator surveillance drone, during what U.S. officials described as a routine surveillance mission Nov. 1 in international airspace over the Persian Gulf.
It was the first time that Iranian aircraft have been known to fire at a U.S. drone, one of the many ways that the United States has sought to monitor developments in Iran over more than three decades of estrangement between the two countries.
The United States said it had protested the shooting via the U.S. interests section at the Swiss Embassy in Tehran and had warned the Iranians that the drone flights would continue.
The U.S. officials said the Predator had been flying about 18 miles off the Iranian coast. Vahidi did not specify where the episode took place, but his assertion that it was in Iranian airspace presented a possible new complication to quiet diplomatic efforts by both countries to engage in direct talks after President Barack Obama’s re-election.
Vahidi’s version of events also differed from the Pentagon version in another way: He said the two Iranian planes, which the Pentagon had identified as Russian made Su-25 jets known as Frogfoots, belonged to the Iranian air force. The United States had said the two planes were under the command of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, whose activities are routinely more aggressive than the conventional air force.
Vahidi, whose account was reported by the Iranian Labor News Agency and other media outlets, said that last week an unidentified plane had entered Iranian airspace over its waters in the Persian Gulf. He said the intruder had been “forced to escape,” after action by Iran’s air force.
It is unclear why Iranian officials kept the episode a secret. It also is unclear, from the Iranian account, whether the warplanes had sought to down the drone and missed or had fired warning shots to chase it away.
A lawmaker, Mohammad Saleh Jokar, a member of the National Security and Foreign Policy Committee of Iran’s parliament, also said the U.S. aircraft had trespassed.
“Early last week, a U.S. drone which had violated Iran’s airspace received a decisive response by the armed forces that were stationed in the region,” he said in a Friday interview with the YoungJournalist Club, an Iranian semiofficial news agency.
Jokar said the drone had been on a spying mission.
“The U.S. drone entered our country’s airspace with an aim to gather information because there is no other justification,” he said.
The Predator’s sensor technology is so sophisticated that it could have monitored activities in Iran from the distance cited by the Pentagon officials in their account.
Iran’s attack on the aircraft was completely legal, Jokar said.
“Any violation against Iran’s airspace, territorial waters and land will receive a strong response by the Islamic Republic of Iran,” he said.
A possible confrontation in the heavily militarized Persian Gulf could present new obstacles in efforts to make progress on resolving the dispute over Iran’s nuclear program, the most intractable issue in Iran’s difficult relations with the West.
But in what appeared to be a sign of progress, the International Atomic Energy Agency announced Friday that it is resuming negotiations with Iran regarding inspector access to sensitive Iranian sites,.
The agency, the nuclear monitoring arm of the United Nations, said in an announcement that it is sending negotiators to Tehran on Dec. 13, the first such meeting since August. An agency spokesman, Gill Tudor, said in an e-mail to news agencies that the purpose of the talks is “toconclude the structured approach to resolving outstanding issues related to Iran’s nuclear program.”
In other developments, Israel’s defense minister said Iran has slowed the timetable for enriching enough uranium to build nuclear weapons, implying that Israel would have more time to decide whether to strike Iran’s enrichment facilities.
Ehud Barak’s assertion that Iran has “essentially delayed their arrival at the red line by eight months” is in line with the time frame laid out by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in September, when he spoke at the U.N. General Assembly. There, Netanyahu said the world has until next summer at the latest to stop Iran before it can build a nuclear bomb.
The West suspects Iran may be aiming toward production of nuclear weapons and has imposed a series of sanctions on the regime.
U.S. lawmakers are working on a set of new sanctions that could prevent Iran from doing business with most of the world until it agrees to internationally demanded constraints on its nuclear program.
Iran denies it is trying to build a bomb, insisting its program is for peaceful purposes.
Information for this article was contributed by Thomas Erdbrink and Rick Gladstone of The New York Times and by Tia Goldenberg of The Associated Press.
Front Section, Pages 8 on 11/10/2012