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Defence & Security
Mahesh

04/08/22 23:42 PM IST

Hellfire R9X missile

In News 
  • The US military used its ‘secret weapon’ — the Hellfire R9X missile (‘Ninja missile’)– to kill Al Qaeda chief Ayman al-Zawahiri on the balcony of a safe house in Kabul.
Features of the missile 
  • Better known in military circles as the AGM-114 R9X, the Hellfire R9X is a US-origin missile known to cause minimum collateral damage while engaging individual targets.
  • It weighs about 45 kg and the missile can also be launched from helicopters, aircraft and Humvees. The range of these missiles varies from 500 metres to 11 km.
  • Originally designed as an anti-tank missile in the 1980s, the Hellfire has been used by military and intelligence agencies over the last two decades to strike targets in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen and elsewhere.
  • Hellfire means Heliborne, Laser, Fire and Forget Missile
  • Al-Zawahiri, an Egyptian surgeon who had a $25 million bounty on his head, had helped coordinate September 11, 2001, attacks that had killed nearly 3,000 people.
Source- Indian Express 

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