BAKU: Russian air defences downed an Azerbaijan Airlines plane that crashed in Kazakhstan, killing 38 people, four sources with knowledge of the preliminary findings of Azerbaijan’s investigation into the disaster told Reuters on Thursday (Dec 26).
Azerbaijan Airlines Flight J2-8243 came down on Wednesday near the city of Aktau in Kazakhstan after diverting from an area of southern Russia in which Moscow has used air defence systems against Ukrainian drone strikes in recent days.
The Embraer passenger jet had flown from Azerbaijan’s capital Baku to Grozny, in Russia’s southern Chechnya region, before veering off hundreds of miles across the Caspian Sea.
It crashed on the opposite shore of the Caspian after what Russia’s aviation watchdog earlier said was an emergency that may have been caused by a bird strike.
Officials did not explain why it had crossed the sea, but the crash occurred after Ukrainian drone strikes this month hit Chechnya. The nearest Russian airport on the plane’s flight path was closed on Wednesday morning.
One of the Azerbaijani sources familiar with the Azerbaijani investigation into the crash told Reuters that preliminary results showed the plane was struck by a Russian Pantsir-S air defence system, and its communications were paralysed by electronic warfare systems on the approach into Grozny.
The source said: “No one claims that it was done on purpose. However, taking into account the established facts, Baku expects the Russian side to confess to the shooting down of the Azerbaijani aircraft.”
Three other sources confirmed that the Azeri investigation had come to the same preliminary conclusion. Russia’s Defence Ministry did not respond to a request for comment.
Kazakhstan’s transport prosecutor for the region where the plane came down said its investigation had not yet come to any conclusions about the crash. Kazakh Deputy Prime Minister Qanat Bozymbaev said he could neither confirm nor deny the thesis that Russian air defences downed the plane.
The Kremlin, asked before the Reuters report about the idea that the aircraft had been shot at by Russian air defences, said that an investigation was ongoing and that it would be improper to comment until the inquiry came to its own conclusions.
“It is wrong to build hypotheses before the conclusions of the investigation,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said.
