The fact that the rear part of the aircraft broke away from the rest before it caught fire allowed twenty-nine people to survive.
BAKU – It would have been a Russian surface-to-air missile that caused the crash of the Azerbaijan Airlines plane near Aktau, Kazakhstan this Wednesday.
Euronews reports this exclusively, citing Azerbaijani government sources, and Reuters confirms the news, citing four government sources from the Caucasian country.
The potential use of air defense systems would be in line with several reports that Chechnya was attacked by Ukrainian drones on the morning of December 25.
According to the independent Russian media Meduza, images of the fallen plane show traces consistent with those of a large missile impact on the tail section of the aircraft, and some survivors reported hearing an explosion.
The aircraft's black box has meanwhile been recovered from the crash site and will soon be analysed.
Kremlin spokesman Dimitri Peskov, when asked about this possibility, replied that “it would be wrong to speculate on the causes of the plane crash in Kazakhstan until the investigations are concluded. We won't do it and no one else should do it.”
In the tragedy, the fact that the rear part of the aircraft separated from the rest of the nacelle before it caught fire allowed twenty-nine people to miraculously survive, including three children.
The Kazakh authorities have also opened an investigation, and the hypothesis is gaining ground among some military experts that the plane was hit in Chechnya.
However, the speaker of the upper house of the Kazakh parliament (Senate), Maulen Ashimbaiev, said that it is not possible for now to say what caused the disaster. “Neither Kazakhstan, nor Russia, nor Azerbaijan have an interest in hiding information,” the political leader was quoted as saying by the Russian Tass agency.
