It’s back to the drawingboard for China:
A dull boom shook the misty bamboo forests of Guangde county, 125 miles southwest of Shanghai, last Sunday, and a plume of smoke rose in the sky, causing Chinese villagers to look up in alarm from their tasks.
Within 24 hours China officially admitted that a “military aircraft” had crashed, that President Hu Jintao had ordered an investigation and that state honours would be bestowed on the victims.
Security teams sealed off the area, carting away the charred remains of 40 people and collecting wreckage with painstaking care. It looked like a routine military accident.
In fact the crash would reverberate all the way to Washington and Tel Aviv, revealing details of a covert Chinese espionage effort to copy Israeli technology in an attempt to match the United States in any future air and sea battle.
Read more at The Times.
