NEW DELHI: India today successfully tested a new “manoeuvrable” version of the BrahMos supersonic cruise missile it developed with Russia, a report said.

The missile was fired from a naval ship in the Bay of Bengal off India’s east coast, BrahMos aerospace chief A Sivathanu Pillai told the Press Trust of India news agency. “The missile... manoeuvred, successfully hitting the target ship. It was a perfect hit and a perfect mission,” he said.

India has thus become one of the few countries to possess such a “manoeuvrable supersonic cruise missile”, he said.

The BrahMos can carry a 200-kg conventional warhead and has a range of 280 km. Indian and Russian experts started development work on the missile in 2001.

A variant of the missile, which gets its name from the rivers of India’s Brahmaputra and Russia’s Moskva, has been in use with the Indian military since 2007.