Iran has hacked the software of an American spy drone which came down its territory and has begun building copies, according to officials.
Iran has hacked the software of an American spy drone which came down its territory and has begun building copies, according to officials.
Tehran said it had decoded hard drives and databases on the RQ-170 Sentinel - an announcement that increased fears of Russia and China gaining access to the top secret technology.
Brigadier Geneeral Amir Ali Hajizadeh, commander of the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps aerospace forces, gave details of the aircraft's operational history as proof that engineers had successfully accessed its records.
He said the drone had flown over Osama bin Laden's hideout in Pakistan a fortnight before the al-Qaeda chief had been killed in an American special forces raid. It had flown in Kandahar, southern Afghanistan, in November 2010 before suffering technical difficulties and being sent for tests on its sensors to an airfield near Los Angeles.
"Had we not accessed the plane's software and hard discs, we wouldn't have been able to achieve these facts," he told the Fars news agency.
The Tehran-based Mehr news agency added that Iran had started manufacturing models of the captured US spy plane, but gave no more details.
The aircraft, which is supposedly the CIA's unseen eye in the sky, can carry advanced sensors capable of sending back a trove of imagery and electronic intercepts.
Analysts believe Iran, China and Russia are particularly interested in the stealth technology and wing coating materials that allow it to escape radar detection.
The unarmed drone was paraded on Iranian state television, apparently intact, after coming down 140 miles inside Iran's eastern border in December.
Tehran said it had been brought down by electronic attack after taking off from a US base in Afghanistan.
America acknowledged the loss of the aircraft, but said it was more likely to have crashed through malfunction.
Analysts suggested at the time that data encryption, self-destruct mechanisms and damage sustained during the crash would render it useless.
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