Iran says it is building a copy of downed U.S. drone

AP photo

Iran claimed Sunday that it had recovered data from an American spy drone that crashed in its eastern region in December and was building a copy of the aircraft, the Associated Press reports .

The Lockheed Martin-built RQ-170 Sentinel that went down was part of an increasingly aggressive intelligence collection program to monitor Iran's military and nuclear facilities, according to reports . Iran rejected Washington's requests for the drone's return.

The chief of the aerospace division of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, Gen. Amir Ali Hajizadeh, told state television that the captured drone is a "national asset" for Iran. "There is almost no part hidden to us in this aircraft. We recovered part of the data that had been erased. There were many codes and characters. But we deciphered them by the grace of God," Hajizadeh said.

The drone had previously surveyed the compound in northwest Pakistan in which Osama bin Laden lived and was killed, Hajizadeh said. He listed a series of tests that had been conducted on the drone and apparently recorded in the aircraft's memory. Read the full story here .