Plane crash in Kazakhstan: Azerbaijan government authorities assure that a Russian missile was to blame for the accident

Euronews reveals this Thursday, December 26 that the Azerbaijan Airlines Embraer 190, which was carrying 62 passengers and five crew members, was indeed hit by a missile. The plane was flying from Baku, the Azerbaijani capital, to Grozny, capital of the Russian Caucasian republic of Chechnya, and crashed near the Caspian Sea port of Aktau before catching fire. The results show 38 people dead and 29 survivors, including three children, were hospitalized.

Also read:
VIDEO. Azerbaijan Airlines plane crashes in Kazakhstan with 67 people on board, 38 dead, announces senior Kazakh official

Damaged plane banned from landing in Russia?

According to our colleagues, Azerbaijani government sources confirmed that a Russian surface-to-air missile had caused the crash although a collision with birds had initially been mentioned. According to sources cited by Euronews, “the missile was fired at Flight 8432 during drone aerial activity over Grozny, and the shrapnel hit passengers and cabin crew, exploding next to the plane in mid-flight.”

Then damaged, the plane would have requested an emergency landing at Russian airports. A request which was refused despite the insistence of the pilots who would have received orders to cross the Caspian Sea towards Aktau, in Kazakhstan. The device will not have succeeded in achieving its new objective and will have ended up in a field.

“Riddled with shards”

This information confirms the first revelations of several experts who all pointed to potential interference from Russia. A Russian blogger and military expert Yuri Podoliaka assured, on Telegram, that visible holes on the plane's fuselage were similar to those that could be caused by “an anti-aircraft missile system”.

Also read:
Azerbaijan Airlines plane crash in Kazakhstan: could the plane have been shot down by mistake by Russian air defense?

“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,” a former expert from the Bureau of Investigation and Analysis for Civil Aviation Safety (BEA) told AFP. “There are still a lot of pieces of shrapnel,” he stressed, estimating that this image was reminiscent of that of the Malaysia Airlines Boeing, Flight MH17, shot down by a surface-to-air missile above Ukraine in 2014.

Also read:
Crash of an Azerbaijan Airlines plane: “They were covered in blood and crying”… Witnesses and survivors recount the horror scene

For his part, the Kremlin spokesperson, Dmitri Peskov, assured this 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.