Iran says it will put on display a series of foreign spy drones that it claims to have obtained, including four Israeli and three US unmanned aircraft, according to a state-run newspaper.

Iran's English-language newspaper, the Tehran Times, quoted "an informed source" as saying that the exhibition will be held "in the near future", and that foreign ambassadors based in Tehran and local journalists would be invited.

"The latest domestically manufactured electronic warfare equipment will also be put on show at the exhibition," the newspaper said. "The foreign unmanned aircraft that Iran has are four Israeli and three US drones."

The Tehran Times and its partner news agency, Mehr, publish articles sanctioned by the regime and reflect the official line.

Last week, Iran's elite revolutionary guards put on show a US unmanned aerial vehicle, believed to be an RQ-170 Sentinel drone, which they claimed to have brought down electronically. However, military experts have questioned the veracity of Iranian claims, while the US insists that the drone malfunctioned and was not brought down by Iran.

Mystery surrounds how Iran got their hands on the aircraft and whether it was genuinely intact, as shown on Iranian TV. Nato said earlier this month that a surveillance drone flying over western Afghanistan went missing and could be the one that entered Iranian airspace along the country's eastern border. Iran says it downed the drone near the eastern city of Kashmar, some 140 miles from the country's border with Afghanistan.

Some analysts have speculated that the US drone displayed in Iran may have been used as part of a campaign to detect a possible covert Iranian nuclear programme.

President Barack Obama on Monday asked Iran to return the drone but Tehran immediately rejected the request and demanded an apology from the US for the invasion of Iranian airspace.

"The American espionage drone is now Iran's property, and our country will decide what steps to take regarding it," said Iran's defence minister, Ahmad Vahidi, according to quotes carried by the semi-official Isna news agency.

Iranian officials also promised to reverse-engineer the drone and decode its technical information. Iran has claimed that Russia and China have requested to see the drone.

The other two US drones were brought down by the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps over the Persian Gulf in January, according to the Tehran Times report.

In the wake of the assassination of its nuclear scientists and a series of mysterious explosions that have set back the regime's nuclear and missile programme, Iran has exploited a unique opportunity with the capture of the US drone to draw a line under its previous embarrassments.

The Christian Science Monitor on Thursday published an interview with an Iranian engineer who claimed to be involved in the Islamic regime's capturing of the US drone. The engineer said Iranian electronic warfare specialists brought down the drone by exploiting a navigational weakness in its GPS system.

Meanwhile, Iran's foreign minister, Ali Akbar Salehi, appealed to Afghanistan to forbid the US from flying drones through its airspace, and from using its land or airspace for intelligence operations, according to the state news agency, IRNA.