Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez said Friday that he had ordered F-16 jets to intercept a U.S. military plane that twice violated Venezuelan airspace on Friday, Xinhua state media reported.
Speaking at a cabinet meeting, Chavez said that the U.S. plane, based on the Netherlands’ Curacao island in the Caribbean, intruded into Venezuelan airspace twice, the first for 15 minutes and the second 19 minutes.
“They are provoking us … these are warplanes,” he said, according to Reuters.
However, a spokesman for US Southern Command, which controls U.S. military activities in Central and South America, completely denied the reports.
He said no U.S. military aircraft flew over Venezuelan airspace on Friday and said no U.S. military aircraft encountered an intercept by Venezuelan jets.
“No such incident took place” Sgt. Shanda De Anda told Fox News.
De Anda added, “as a matter of policy we don’t fly over sovereign airspace without prior consent. We respect Venezuelan airspace and we don’t fly there without pre-coordination.”
In the words of another Senior Defense official in Washington, “Chavez has made these types of claims before and often does so for attention.”
Once in the past few years a US counter-narcotics airplane flew over their space and we apologized, the official said.