Mexico City, Feb. 7, (dpa/GNA) - A Chinese balloon was sighted over Costa Rica, the Latin American country’s Foreign Ministry said on Monday.
The Costa Rican Foreign Ministry cited the Chinese Embassy in San Jose as saying it regretted the incident and that the device’s purpose was exclusively scientific, mostly meteorological.
The embassy also said that the balloon was not a threat to any country and that it ended up over Costa Rica by mistake due to weather conditions and limited self-direction capacity, the ministry said in a statement.
It wasn’t initially clear whether the aircraft was the same that was spotted over Colombia on Friday.
A similar Chinese balloon meanwhile was discovered over US airspace last week. Washington accused Beijing of using it for surveillance purposes and shot it down on Saturday.
In response, Beijing summoned the US charge d’affaires and repeated earlier statements that the balloon was a civilian aircraft, saying that Washington shooting it down was an “obvious overreaction.”
Beijing argued that both the balloon seen over Columbia and the one shot down by the US serve “civilian purposes,” had veered off course and were hard to manoeuvre.
GNA