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Azerbaijan Dismisses Claims on Its Airspace Used to Attack Iran

Azerbaijan Dismisses Claims on Its Airspace Used to Attack Iran
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Azerbaijan Dismisses Claims on Its Airspace Used to Attack Iran

Azerbaijan Dismisses Claims on Its Airspace Used to Attack Iran

Azerbaijan’s Defense Ministry on Monday denied allowing another country to use its airspace to carry out attacks on Iran.

"Information about Russia's 'Container' radar system detecting unknown planes using Azerbaijan's airspace to carry out attacks on Iran is an absolute lie," Azerbaijan's Defense Ministry said according to Azerbaijan's International News.

“The dissemination of such information is aimed at undermining the Azerbaijani-Iranian relations," the Ministry told International News and declared that the allegations of Azerbaijan's involvement were propagated by "pro-Armenian forces" with the aim of damaging the relations between Iran and Azerbaijan.

The Azerbaijani Defense Ministry also stressed that Azerbaijan has never taken any steps against Iran and will not do so in the future.

The source of the news about the detection of foreign planes in Azerbaijan's airspace is the lesser-known Avia-Pro news website of Russia. The news website on Monday claimed that the drones that attacked Iran's military and nuclear sites had been detected by the Russian Radar system.

In recent days there have been explosions at two of Iran's top security nuclear and military facilities – Khojir in the east of Tehran and Natanz in Isfahan province.

Iranian authorities said the incident at the first site was caused by the explosion of a gas storage tank but have delayed the announcement of the cause of the incident at Natanz "for security reasons".

When video footage of the blast surfaced online, the Iranian Defense Ministry quickly rolled out a spokesman to downplay the incident. Davoud Abdi, speaking on state television, dismissed it as a minor blast at a gas-storage facility in a “public area” of the Parchin military complex, outside the Iranian capital.

A well-known former site of nuclear activity, an explosion at the Parchin military complex would undoubtedly have been a serious incident.

Satellite imagery later suggested that the explosion took place at the Hemmat Industrial Complex, east of Tehran and away some 24 km from Parchin.

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Japan, China Trade Barbs over Fighter Jet Maneuvers

China and Japan traded barbs after a Chinese J-15 fighter jet followed a Japanese patrol plane at the weekend. Handout / Japan's Ministry of Defense/AFP
China and Japan traded barbs after a Chinese J-15 fighter jet followed a Japanese patrol plane at the weekend. Handout / Japan's Ministry of Defense/AFP
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Japan, China Trade Barbs over Fighter Jet Maneuvers

China and Japan traded barbs after a Chinese J-15 fighter jet followed a Japanese patrol plane at the weekend. Handout / Japan's Ministry of Defense/AFP
China and Japan traded barbs after a Chinese J-15 fighter jet followed a Japanese patrol plane at the weekend. Handout / Japan's Ministry of Defense/AFP

Beijing condemned on Thursday what it called "dangerous behavior" by a Japanese military plane over the Pacific after Tokyo said Chinese fighter jets flew unusually close to its aircraft at the weekend.

The Japanese government had complained to China over the incident, in which no Japanese military personnel were reported injured.

A Chinese J-15 fighter jet from the Shandong aircraft carrier followed a Japanese P-3C patrol plane for 40 minutes on Saturday, according to the Japanese defense ministry.

Two J-15 jets then did the same for 80 minutes on Sunday.

"During these long periods, the jets flew unusually close to the P-3C, and they flew within 45 meters" of the patrol plane on both days, an official from the Japanese ministry told AFP.

Also on Sunday, Chinese jets cut across airspace around 900 meters (3,000 feet) ahead of a P-3C Japanese patrol plane at the same altitude -- a distance a P-3C can reach within a few seconds at cruising speed, Tokyo said.

"We do not believe that this approach was made by mistake," the Japanese military's chief of staff Yoshihide Yoshida told reporters on Thursday.

"Given it happened for 40 minutes and 80 minutes, for two days in a row, our understanding is that it was done on purpose," he said.

Beijing's foreign ministry spokesman Lin Jian hit back at the Japanese description of the events.

"The root cause of the risk to maritime and air security was the close reconnaissance of China's normal military activities by a Japanese warplane," he said.

"The Chinese side urges the Japanese side to stop this kind of dangerous behavior."

'Abnormal approaches'

The incident followed the sighting in recent days of two Chinese aircraft carriers sailing in the Pacific simultaneously for the first time.

Japan said this week the aircraft carriers' activity -- described by China as "routine training" -- showed the expanding geographic scope of Beijing's military.

Yoshida said on Thursday loosening Japan's surveillance, information-gathering or countermeasures against intrusion "would encourage attempts to change the status quo by force".

Tokyo's top government spokesman Yoshimasa Hayashi earlier told reporters in regard to the fighter jet incident that "such abnormal approaches can lead to an accidental collision, so we have expressed serious concerns" to the Chinese side.

US ambassador to Japan George Glass said on social media platform X that the maneuvers by a Chinese fighter "put Japanese crewmembers' lives in peril".

"Whether it's harassing Philippine ships, attacking Vietnamese fishermen, or firing flares at Australian aircraft, Beijing knows only reckless aggression. Not so much a charm offensive as offensive harm," Glass said.

Similar incidents were last reported in May and June 2014, when Chinese Su-27 fighter jets flew within 30 meters (100 feet) of Japanese military planes in the East China Sea.

Japan summoned the Chinese ambassador at the time, while the two sides traded accusations of blame.

Daisuke Kawai, director of the University of Tokyo's economic security and policy innovation program, told AFP this week that the timing of the aircraft carrier movements could be linked to US-China economic tensions.

"Beijing calculated that the United States would be less willing or able to respond militarily at this precise moment, seeing it as an opportune time to demonstrate its expanding military capabilities," he said.