Pakistan drone crashes near oil refinery: navy

AFP/Karachi

Police officers, rescue workers and the media gather outside gates of the National Refinery Limited after a Pakistani Naval unmanned aerial vehicle crashed in its grounds in Karachi yesterday

A Pakistani surveillance navy drone crashed near an oil refinery after hitting a bird on a routine flight, coming down in the country’s largest city of Karachi yesterday, the navy said. “A Pakistan Navy UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) crashed after a bird hit it. It fell near an oil refinery and there was no (other) damage,” navy spokesman Commodore Irfan Ul Haq told AFP in Islamabad. Fellow navy spokesman Commander Salman Ali said that there were no casualties and that the drone had been on a surveillance flight when a bird flew into the aircraft and it came down in the Karachi suburbs. Pakistan’s military is known to operate surveillance drones but the United States operates a drone missile war in the country’s northwestern border areas with Afghanistan, targeting Taliban and Al Qaeda militants. The campaign is deeply unpopular among an anti-American public and the government has publicly demanded an end to the attacks, although in private military and civilian leaders are thought to co-operate in the programme. Ali refused to say how many drones the nuclear-armed nation operates. “We can’t give the figure, but we use them for surveillance and photography over our territorial waters,” Ali said. It was the third aircraft crash in Karachi in eight months.