Hellfire R9X missile

Hellfire R9X missile

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.

About:
• 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.
• 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.