China says unmanned airship over US was isolated, unexpected event

BEIJING (Reuters) – China has made it clear that the unmanned civilian airship that flew over U.S. terriory was an unexpected and isolated event, the foreign ministry said on Tuesday.

“China rejects distortion and hyping up of this incident,” spokesperson Mao Ning said at a press briefing when answering a question on the Pentagon saying that it could not confirm China collected real-time data from the balloon earlier this year.

(Reporting by Laurie Chen; Writing by Bernard Orr; Editing by Andrew Heavens)