Iran airs footage of downed drone

TEHRAN, Dec. 10 (MNA)--The first video footage of the drone was broadcast on Iranian television on Thursday. The wingspan of the radar-evading drone is 26 meters, the length of the fuselage is 4.5 meters, and the plane has a height of 1.84 meters. According to the Washington Post, the RQ-170 Sentinel has been used by the CIA for highly sensitive missions into other nations’ airspace, including months of surveillance of the compound in Pakistan in which Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden was allegedly hiding before he was killed in an attack by Special Operations forces on May 1, 2011. The New York Times reported on December 7 that the drone was part of a stepped-up surveillance program that has frequently sent the United States’ most hard-to-detect drone into the country to map suspected nuclear sites.