TEHRAN / WASHINGTON — The US military on Thursday denied an Iranian claim that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) had captured an American surveillance drone near the Strait of Hormuz, in the latest competing claim from a day of unverified Iranian announcements about the waterway.

Source: Associated Press via The Reflector, 29 Oct 2026

Iranian state television reported that the IRGC Navy's electronic-warfare unit detected and identified an MQM-170 Outlaw drone, took over its control systems and landed it in Iranian territory. The report did not say when the drone was allegedly seized. Iranian accounts said the aircraft's alleged mission was to identify Iran's air-defence systems along the Persian Gulf coast and the strait, and that it had taken off from the coast of a country on the southern shore of the Gulf.

Source: PressTV via Newscord, 29 Oct 2026

US Central Command said the report was false. "In the past weeks and months, the IRGC has repeatedly lied out of desperation, and today is no different," said Tim Hawkins, a spokesman for Central Command. He gave no further details.

One of three separate Iranian claims on Thursday

The capture claim is separate from two other Iranian announcements Awaaz Punjab is reporting individually: the IRGC's claim that its air defences downed a US MQ-1 drone east of the strait, and its claim that three oil tankers struck mines on an unauthorised southern route — which has also not been independently confirmed. Treating the claims separately matters, because each has a different evidence base: for the drone capture, the only evidence offered so far is Iranian state media's account, and the US has issued an on-record denial.

Iran made a similar claim in 2011, saying it had brought down a US RQ-170 Sentinel drone with an "electronic ambush"; US officials said at the time that the drone had malfunctioned. With the strait — which carries about a fifth of the world's traded oil and liquefied natural gas — still at the centre of the US–Iran confrontation, claim-and-denial exchanges over drones have become a regular feature of the standoff, watched closely by tanker crews and by the lakhs of Punjabi and Indian workers across the Gulf.