WASHINGTON — The White House on Monday denied Beijing’s accusation that the United States has been sending balloons over China to conduct surveillance, as tensions about espionage rise between the 2 superpowers.
“Any claim that the US government operates surveillance balloons over the PRC is false,” National Security Council spokesperson Adrienne Watson mentioned on Twitter.
“It is China that has a high-altitude surveillance balloon program for intelligence collection, that it has used to violate the sovereignty of the US and over 40 countries across 5 continents.”
The State Department responded with the same rejection, and known as Beijing’s accusation “the latest example of China scrambling to do damage control.”
“It has repeatedly and wrongly claimed the surveillance balloon it sent over the United States was a weather balloon and to this day has failed to offer any credible explanations for its intrusion into our airspace and the airspace of others,” a State Department spokesperson mentioned in a press release.
Earlier Monday China hit again towards US expenses of balloon espionage, accusing the United States of getting despatched greater than 10 balloons into its airspace since January 2022.
Washington’s response marked the newest improvement in an more and more tense saga that included the downing of an alleged Chinese spy balloon off the coast of South Carolina earlier this month, after it had traversed a lot of the United States.
The US army subsequently shot down three different unidentified objects over North America in current days—one shot down Friday over Alaska, one on Saturday over Canada’s Yukon territory, and the newest one on Sunday over Lake Huron—sparking widespread jitters and hypothesis as to their origins.
Only the primary object has been formally attributed to China, with Beijing insisting it was a civilian craft that had blown off track.
On Monday, White House spokesman John Kirby mentioned US authorities “haven’t been able to gain access” but to the newest three objects shot down, due largely to climate situations which have slowed search and restoration operations. — Agence France-Presse
Source: www.gmanetwork.com
