卫报: 塔利班声称击落美军E-11A电子战飞机 机上载有大量CIA高官
A Taliban spokesman claims the group has shot down a US military aircraft over eastern Afghanistan.
The US military said on Monday it was investigating reports of a crash in Taliban-controlled territory.
Footage purportedly taken from the snowy wreckage site showed the US air force insignia on the charred fuselage.
A spokesman for the Taliban, Zabihullah Mujahid, said in a statement posted online: “An American invader aircraft has been shot down. Lots of officers have been killed.”
He claimed high-ranking CIA officers had been onboard the plane. Neither the footage nor his claims could be verified.
[iframe][/iframe] 6park.comIn separate comments, Mujahid told the Guardian the purported shoot-down “has no impact” on the ongoing negotiations over the US withdrawal from Afghanistan. “No agreement has been reached yet and Americans are continuing their attacks too.”
Tariq Ghazniwal, a local journalist, said he saw two bodies but others had counted a total of five.
The aircraft in the footage appeared to show a US air force E-11 Battlefield Airborne Communications Node. It has been described by the air force as “Wi-Fi in the sky”, a roving communications satellite to support missions in remote areas without existing infrastructure.
The Taliban have occasionally been reported to have access to anti-aircraft weapons, including cases where they fired Stinger missiles of the kind supplied to the rebels by the CIA during the 1980s Russian occupation. 6park.com [iframe][/iframe]
In 2007, Taliban fighters were thought to have used a shoulder-mounted surface-to-air missile to shoot down a British Chinook helicopter, killing all onboard.
The Afghan government initially said a passenger jet carrying more than 80 people had crashed, but retracted the claim a few hours later
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