TEHRAN: Iran presented what officials described as its first domestically-made hyper-sonic ballistic missile on Tuesday, the official IRNA news agency reported, an announcement likely to heighten Western concerns about Tehran’s missile ca-pabilities.
Iranian state media published pictures of the missile named Fattah at a ceremony attended by President Ebrahim Rahisi and commanders of Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards Corps.
“The precision-guided Fattah hypersonic missile has a range of 1,400 kilometres and it is capable of penetrating all defence shields,” Amirali Hajizadeh, the head of the Guards’ aer-ospace force, was quoted as saying by Iranian state media.
Hypersonic missiles can fly at least five times faster than the speed of sound and on a com-plex trajectory, which makes them difficult to intercept.
Last year, the Islamic Republic said it had built a hypersonic ballistic missile which can manoeuvre in and out of the atmos-phere.
State TV said Iran’s Fattah missile can target “the enemy’s advanced anti-missile systems and is a big generational leap in the field of missiles”. –Agencies
