North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un visited the country’s Academy of Defense Sciences on Saturday to observe the unveiling of four new types of exploding attack drones.
State-controlled KCNA reported that during Kim’s visit, the loitering munitions underwent successful tests where they were able to identify and destroy selected targets along various flight paths.
A spokesperson for South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, Lee Chang Hyun, told reporters during a press conference after the event that intelligence officials monitored the exercises and that the South Korean armed forces can defend against the unmanned aerial systems.
Some Western observers noted that the weapons demonstrated have a similar appearance to several examples used by other countries, including Russia’s Lancet, the Islamic Republic’s Shahed, and the Israeli HAROP and HERO devices.
Although military cooperation is well known between Pyongyang, Moscow, and Tehran, the presence of prototypes sharing congruent features to Israel’s arsenal may suggest that hackers from the Iran regime might have illicitly obtained sensitive information from some of the Jewish state’s defense contractors.
In 2014, Tehran announced the reverse engineering of a U.S. RQ-170 ‘Sentinel’ that had been captured in 2011 near the city of Kashmar while on a purported reconnaissance mission. This claim was verified in 2018 when an Israeli AH-64 helicopter intercepted a Syrian-fired drone over Beit She’an that reportedly had technology and design characteristics based on the apprehended American hardware.
Related Story: Hamas May Have Used North Korean Weapons During Israel Terror Attack: Reports
