Russia warned on Thursday December 26 against “hypotheses” circulating about the cause of the crash of an Azerbaijan Airlines plane, which killed 38 people the day before in Kazakhstan, with experts raising the possibility that the plane had was accidentally shot down by Russian anti-aircraft defense.
This Embraer 190 aircraft with 67 people on board was flying on Wednesday between Baku, capital of Azerbaijan, and Grozny, capital of the Russian Caucasian republic of Chechnya. It crashed and caught fire near Aktau, a Caspian Sea port in western Kazakhstan and far from its normal route, killing 38 people, according to authorities in the Central Asian country.
An investigation is underway but some military and aviation experts said the plane, which was flying over an area of the Russian Caucasus where a drone attack was reported, may have been shot down by accident by a Russian air defense system. Speculations that both Russia and Kazakhstan have tried to extinguish. Kremlin spokesperson Dmitri Peskov assured Thursday that we had to “wait for the end of the investigation.” “It would be inappropriate to make assumptions before the conclusions of the investigation. We will not do it and no one should do it,” he insisted.
The authorities of Kazakhstan, a close ally of Russia, also denounced “speculation”. The president of the Kazakh Senate, the upper house of the Parliament of Kazakhstan, Maoulen Ashimbaev, assured that it was “not possible” to say for the moment the cause of this disaster.
Azerbaijan Airlines initially claimed that the plane had hit a flock of birds, before withdrawing this information. This version was also mentioned on Wednesday by the Russian civil aviation agency (Rosaviatsia). But the holes visible on the fuselage of the plane are one of the elements cited to support the track of the downed plane.
“It reminds me of MH17”
A Russian blogger and military expert, Yuri Podoliaka, assured on Telegram that these traces were similar to those that could be caused by “an anti-aircraft missile system”. A former expert from the Bureau of Investigation and Analysis for Civil Aviation Safety (BEA) told AFP that he had “still a lot of shrapnel”, i.e. fragments from an explosion. “What we actually see is the testimony of a passenger who received shrapnel in his life jacket, […] that the cabin, the entire rear part, the fin, is completely riddled with shards”, he added. According to this expert, who testifies anonymously, it “reminds one of MH17”, a Malaysia Airlines Boeing shot down by a surface-to-air missile over Ukraine in 2014, killing 298 people.
For its part, the regional department of the Kazakh Ministry of Health reported, in a press release, the “explosion of a balloon” on board the aircraft, without further details. The Kazakh Interior Ministry has opened an investigation into “violation of air transport safety and operational rules.”
According to the Flightradar24 service, which tracks the movement of planes in real time, the aircraft crossed the Caspian Sea, deviating from its normal route, before circling above the area where it crashed. .
According to the Kazakh Ministry of Emergency Situations, “29 survivors, including three children, were hospitalized.” On board the plane were 37 Azerbaijanis, six Kazakhs, three Kyrgyz and 16 Russians, according to the Kazakh Transport Ministry. According to the Azerbaijani agency Azertac, 12 of the survivors are due to return to Azerbaijan on Thursday, where a day of national mourning was declared Thursday by President Ilham Aliyev. Nine injured Russians, including a child, were brought back to Moscow, according to the Russian Emergency Situations Ministry. Russian President Vladimir Putin expressed his “condolences” to his Azerbaijani counterpart, according to the Kremlin.