Behind the birds, the missile: for Astana and Moscow, the crash of the Azerbaijan Airlines flight is embarrassing

Published on December 26, 2024 at 7:07 p.m. / Modified on December 26, 2024 at 7:25 p.m.

3 mins. reading

For the 62 passengers and five crew members on board Azerbaijan Airlines aircraft J2-8243 which departed Wednesday morning from Baku, capital of Azerbaijan, towards Grozny, it was to be a short, uneventful flight. But suddenly, nightmare: the survivors recount the aborted descent on the capital of the Republic of Chechnya, the sound of an explosion then a plane losing altitude and speed which tries to cross the Caspian Sea only to crash a few kilometers from Aktau Airport, Kazakhstan. The impact split the aircraft, a Brazilian-made Embraer 190, in two. A fire ravaged the front while the rear remained virtually intact. This is where most of the 29 survivors were sitting.

From the first hours of the accident, the Russian and then Azerbaijani authorities spoke of the thick fog that fell on the Chechen capital on December 25, then a bird strike above the Caspian Sea. What struck both international and local experts, however, was the multitude of impacts that dotted the tail and part of the fuselage, characteristic, according to them, of the explosion of an anti-aircraft missile. That day, Grozny airport was closed due to a new Ukrainian drone attack. The secretary of the Chechen Security Council Hamzat Kadyrov (one of the nephews of the leader of the Republic, Ramzan Kadyrov) even boasted of the effectiveness of the anti-aircraft defense which would have brought down “all its targets”.

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