Iran successfully
launched a live monkey into space last week, the government said today.
There is no independent confirmation of the
achievement and there have been no announcements by Western powers of any
Iranian launch late last week. The monkey was said to have returned
"intact", an achievement the Iranians celebrated as an advance in a
missile and space programme that has given the West and Israel cause for
concern.
The monkey was said to have been sent up in a
Kavoshgar rocket that climbed to a height of more than 75 miles before
returning. In 2011, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad unveiled the space capsule
designed to carry the live monkey into space but that attempt was reported to
have failed.
At the time, Fazeli touted the launch of a large
animal into space as the first step towards sending a man into space, which
Tehran says is scheduled for 2020. Iran sent small animals into space - a rat,
turtles and worms - aboard its Kavoshgar-3 rocket in 2010.
Iran's decade-long space programme has raised
alarms in the West because the same technology that allows missiles to launch
satellites can be used to fire warheads. Israel, the US and others claims that
Iran is trying to develop nuclear weapons but the country's president, Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad, denies that. Tehran maintains that its nuclear work is nothing but
peaceful.
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| "Proof": An image grab from Al-Alam TV shows the Iranian flag at an unknown location flying on front of a capsule allegedly containing a live monkey which the Tehran-based channel said they sent up into space |
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