Pakistan get, receives US surveillance aircraft:
The Pakistani navy took delivery of two high-techs, US-made surveillance aircraft nine months after Islamist militants destroyed two similar planes, officials said. Pakistan said the P3C aircraft, modified with the most up-to-date avionics, are designed to get better surveillance in the North Arabian Sea, one of the world’s most significant shipping routes intensely disturbed by Somali piracy. ’The two aircraft have been delivered to the Pakistan navy. These aircraft have been provided under the foreign military funding programme,’ a spokesperson for the US embassy in Islamabad.
Relations between Pakistan and the United States were sternly damaged last year by a covert American raid that killed Osama bin Laden and air strikes that killed 24 Pakistani soldiers, and the coalition remains apprehensive. The navy said the aircraft would assist, help ‘maintain necessary vigil in our very important area of interest in the North Arabian Sea‘, which it said was ‘home to intense maritime activity both legal and illegal and thus warrants continuous guard’. Pakistan is to take delivery of six P3C aircraft from the United States in three batches. The first two, received in 2010, were destroyed during a 17-hour siege of a key naval base in Karachi last May blamed on the Taliban. The attack killed 10 personnel and deeply embarrassed the military, just three weeks after bin Laden was killed in the garrison town of Abbottabad KPK Pakistan.
Source via The Express Tribune: