In an interview with the French RFI radio station, General Mahamat Nouri said "the day before we fired a missile" at the French plane, which was not hit, after it had made "several passes above the rebels."
He added that it appeared the French plane "had not fired, but the guys thought the plane had fired, so they fired" the missile, the head of the Union for the Forces of Democracy and Development (UFDD) told RFI.
When questioned by the radio, Nouri called the attack a mistake. The rebel leader added that his forces were "provoked" by the French military which he said "is doing reconnaissance for the Chadian army." The French military earlier on Tuesday said a ground-to-air missile had been fired at a French reconnaissance plane in eastern Chad, where rebels hostile to the N'Djamena regime are active.
"An aircraft's sensors detected a missile being fired on Monday morning," a spokesman for the armed forces chief of staff in Paris said.
Though the French plane, a Breguet Atlantique 2, was not endangered by the missile, the army was treating it as hostile fire since no other aircraft was in the sector at the time, Major Cristophe Prazuck said.

Copyright AFP (Agence France-Presse), 2006