Detected Chinese balloons all weather balloons: Taiwan's military
ROC Central News Agency
02/14/2023 01:06 PM
Taipei, Feb. 14 (CNA) Taiwan's military on Tuesday said all Chinese balloons detected in Taiwan's airspace to date were weather balloons and did not pose a security threat that justified shooting them down.
The comment came after the Financial Times reported Monday that dozens of Chinese military balloons have been spotted flying through Taiwan's airspace in the past few years.
"They come very frequently, the last one just a few weeks ago," an unnamed senior Taiwanese official was quoted as saying.
Similar incursions happen once a month on average, another unnamed official was cited as saying by the Financial Times.
Asked about the assertions on Chinese balloon incursions at a press briefing Tuesday, Major General Huang Wen-chi (黃文啓), who is with the Office of Deputy Chief of the General Staff on Intelligence, said the Ministry of National Defense (MND) had no comment on the report.
The military will not make public the exact number of such incursions detected "to avoid giving away the sources of our intelligence gathering," the one-star general said.
Huang only said that the number of detected balloons from China "are in accordance with the number of weather balloons it sends each year," which meant that all of the detected Chinese balloons were likely for meteorological purposes.
Asked if Taiwan's military has shot down any Chinese balloons after detecting them, Huang said the military has so far not found any of the balloons to pose a serious serious threat to the degree that they needed to be destroyed.
He insisted, however, that the military would take such action if it found that a balloon was a major threat to Taiwan's security.
Previously, the MND had only confirmed that Chinese balloon flyovers had occurred once, when four batches of Chinese balloons flew over northern Taiwan in February 2022.
Chinese balloon programs have drawn global attention after a suspected Chinese spy balloon was spotted and shot down by the United States on Feb. 4 in American airspace.
The incident also set up a diplomatic crisis, with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken calling off a trip to China.
Beijing, however, has denied that the balloon was used for spying and claimed it was a civilian airship blown off course.
Taiwan has been circumspect about previous sightings of Chinese balloons.
On Feb. 27, 2022, it said that prior to that day, there had been four sightings of balloons over Keelung, Taoyuan, Hsinchu and Taichung and that they were likely to be for meteorological or scientific research purposes.
After the more recent incident in the U.S., the military had said little about local balloon sightings publicly until Huang's comments on Tuesday.
(By Joseph Yeh)
Enditem/ls
|
NEWSLETTER
|
| Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list |
|
|
|
