War in Sky: Missile takes down flying object in Canadian airspace
By Our Special Correspondent
New Delhi, February 12: In a third incident in about a week, the US fighter jets were involved in shooting down an unidentified flying object in the Canadian airspace. Prime Minister of Canada Justine Trudeau announced that a joint operation with the US Air Force carried out an operation to take down an unidentified object that had violated the Canadian airspace.
“I ordered the take down of an unidentified object that violated Canadian airspace,” said Trudeau on Twitter. The North American Aerospace Defence Command (NORAD Command) was involved in shooting down the unidentified object. The NORAD Command had also taken down a similar flying object of the size of a car in North America yesterday.
The two incidents of shooting down unidentified flying objects came on the back of an unprecedented scaling up of tension between the US and China after President Joe Biden ordered shooting down a Chinese surveillance balloon on February 4 for which several fighter jets were scrambled. China continues to stay unprovoked while making it loud that the balloon was a weather monitoring system which went astray from its course.
The Chinese spy balloon in the US airspace turned into a hot issues in the national politics. The US Congress Speaker Kevin McCarthy had called for a special briefing by the intelligence heads on the spotting of the Chinese surveillance balloon. Biden too sought to convey that he had zero tolerance of the Chinese spy game in the US airspace.
“The NORAD Command shot down the object over the Yukon. Canadian and the US aircraft were scrambled, and a US F-22 successfully fired at the object,” added Trudeau in another tweet. He also said, “I spoke with President Biden this afternoon. Canadian Forces will now recover and analyze the wreckage of the object. Thank you to NORAD for keeping the watch over North America.”
The US Pentagon in the recent days has also been talking about NORAD modernization, while making it clear that Washington will scale up its presence in the Arctic and Indo-Pacific. US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken had cancelled his scheduled visit, which was agreed during a two-hour bilateral summit between Chinese President Xi Jinping and Biden on the sidelines of the G20 Summit in Bali, Indonesia. With the US raising heat over the Chinese global surveillance, reports are emerging that there had been several such incidents of Beijing snooping from air over the Indian and Japanese airspaces in the last few years also.
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