US shoots down suspected Chinese spy balloon over Atlantic Ocean

A US warplane has shot down a Chinese high-altitude balloon over the Atlantic Ocean after it had crossed the entire US and caused a diplomatic rift between the two countries.

The balloon, which China said is for meteorological purposes but the US insists has been spying, could be seen on television collapsing and falling from the sky. A senior military official told reporters the balloon had been downed by a single missile fired from a F-22 Raptor fighter jet that took off from Langley Air Force base in Virginia.

An aviation exclusion area was declared off the South Carolina coast before fighter jets were launched, and a salvage operation by Navy and Coast Guard vessels was reported to be under way to recover fragments of the destroyed balloon over a 7-mile field of debris. Aviation Week quoted a senior military official as saying the debris was in 47-foot deep water, and so would be relatively easy to salvage.

A military official told reporters that US Navy divers and unmanned diving vessels would be sent down to raise the remnants of the balloon and its payload to the surface.

The balloon was launched in China and reached the US Aleutian Islands off Alaska on 28 January, arriving in Canada two days later.

China had expressed regret for the overflight, claiming it was a weather balloon that had been blown off course, but the Pentagon rejected the claim, insisting that it was a surveillance aircraft able to manoeuvre. One of the states it flew over was Montana, which is home to some of the US arsenal of nuclear intercontinental ballistic missiles.

The incursion led the secretary of state, Antony Blinken, to cancel a planned visit this weekend to Beijing, where he had been due to meet President Xi Jinping for discuss tensions between the two countries.