The Islamic Republic of Iran has formally filed a complaint to the UN Security Council against the United States over the violation of its airspace with a reconnaissance drone shot down by the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) earlier this month.
“The (Iranian) Foreign Ministry filed a complaint to the UN Security Council and the organization’s president (Mansour al-Otaibi) after a US spy drone violated Iran's airspace and was shot down. It lodged the complaint under Article 51 of the UN Charter,” Iran’s Deputy Foreign Minister for Legal and International Affairs Gholam-Hossein Dehqani said on Friday.
“The complaint states that Iran reserves the right to defend its maritime borders and confront any violation in case such acts are repeated. The US side claims that the drone had not entered the Iranian airspace. This is while they cannot corroborate such an allegation because it went down in the Iranian territory after being targeted,” he pointed out.
The IRGC shot down the intruding American spy drone in Iran’s southern coastal province of Hormozgan on June 20.
It said in a statement that the US-made Global Hawk surveillance drone was brought down by its Air Force near the Kouh-e Mobarak region — which sits in the central district of Jask County — after the aircraft violated the Iranian airspace.
According to the statement, the Global Hawk had flown from one of the American bases in the southern parts of the Persian Gulf region at 00:14 a.m. local time, with its identification transponders off in breach of all international aviation rules.
Elsewhere in his remarks, Dehqani stated that even though the International Court of Justice (ICJ) has ordered the United States to halt the unilateral sanctions it has re-imposed on the supply of humanitarian goods such as medicine, food and medical devices, to Iran, Washington is pressing ahead with its campaign of “maximum pressure” on Tehran.
The United States has been escalating tensions with Iran under President Donald Trump. Leading a signature policy of “maximum pressure,” the US quit a United Nations-ratified nuclear agreement between Iran and six world states, which had been struck in 2015. It then proceeded to restore the sanctions that had been lifted under the deal.
Press TV
