On Monday Japan said that a Chinese military plane had violated its airspace, it was the first such move by a Chinese aircraft, according to the media reports. Japan’s defence ministry said an Y-9 surveillance aircraft at 11.29am on Monday “violated the territorial airspace off the Danjo islands in Nagasaki prefecture” in the East China Sea and lasted two minutes. It prompted Japan to deploy “fighter jets on an emergency basis”, according to the media reports.
The latest development could fuel tensions between the two countries following repeated maritime provocations by China in the region, the state media said.
The aircraft circled above waters southeast of the islands multiple times before and after entering Japan’s airspace, eventually heading toward China around 1:15 p.m. Japanese ministry of Defence said that the Japanese Air Self-Defence Force (ASDF) fighters did not use weapons or signal flares.
Japan’s Vice foreign minister Masataka Okano summoned China’s acting ambassador late on Monday to lodge a “extremely serious protest,” and called for measures against a recurrence, the Japanese foreign ministry said in a statement.
There were previous incursions by non-military aircraft involving a propeller-powered Chinese marine surveillance plane and a small drone that had taken off from a China Coast Guard vessel and went into airspace near the disputed Senkaku islands in 2012 and 2017.
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