Tehran: Perplexed residents of Tehran focused their eyes — and smartphones — upward on Monday afternoon as anti-aircraft weapons hidden on rooftops suddenly began blasting away at “an unidentified flying object” in the clear sky.
It was the second time in a month that anti-aircraft guns had opened fire in Tehran, Iran’s capital. And both times the target turned out to be, according to the authorities, a camera drone.
“It was like a series of explosions, our windows shook. My husband was in a panic, but I was not. I didn’t see anything,” Mojgan Faraji, a journalist, said on Monday. Videos quickly spread across social media.
#BREAKING: Drone shot down by Iran's counter-air defence in central Tehranpic.twitter.com/E31dtWdbyo
— Sobhan Hassanvand (@Hassanvand) January 16, 2017
But as is often the case in Iran, exactly what happened was open to interpretation.
“The drone was flying close to a forbidden zone,” Ali Asgar Naserbakht, a city official, told the state news agency, IRNA. He was probably referring to a government compound in the centre of Tehran where President Hassan Rouhani and Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, have their offices.
“An investigation will be started into what institute or organisation controlled it,” Naserbakht added.
Iran’s anti-aircraft forces, who protect strategic places like the nuclear test reactor in the western part of the city and the airports in the south, are the last line of defence in case of an aerial attack. Placed in strategic rings around the city, sometimes covered under camouflage nets, they are rarely seen — or heard.
Footage of anti-aircraft shooting in central #Tehran, #Iran's capital city. A drone has, reportedly, been targeted. pic.twitter.com/uZbrrtVvQs
— Abas Aslani (@AbasAslani) January 16, 2017
On Monday though, it seemed as though the entire city had not only heard them but also managed to film some as they were firing toward the sky from rooftops.
In December, a camera drone was shot down in the same area. At the time, officials said there had been a mix-up and that the device belonged to state television, which had been filming the weekly Friday prayer session. That day, however, the event was organised somewhere else, inside a mosque. Representatives of state television denied that they had a drone in the area, and no images of the debris were made public.
