Russia and Kazakhstan have sought to mood hypothesis about the reason for the Azerbaijan Airways airplane crash, with the Kremlin urging individuals to attend for the outcomes of an investigation.
A Ukrainian nationwide safety official has claimed that the crash, which killed 38 individuals on Christmas Day, was attributable to Russian air defence fireplace.
The airplane, which was flying from the Azerbaijani capital, Baku, to the Russian metropolis of Grozny in Chechnya, got here down in a area close to Aktau in Kazakhstan after veering a whole bunch of miles off its deliberate route. Twenty-nine individuals survived.
Video of the crash appeared to indicate the airplane plummeting out of the sky and bursting into flames because it hit the bottom and thick, black plumes of smoke rising.
On Thursday, the Kremlin spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, mentioned the investigation into the reason for the crash was below approach, including that it could be fallacious to invest earlier than the inquiry concluded.
The chair of Kazakhstan’s senate additionally harassed on Thursday that the trigger remained unknown. “None of these countries – neither Azerbaijan, Russia nor Kazakhstan – is interested in hiding information. All information will be made available to the public,” mentioned Ashimbayev Maulen.
Their feedback got here after Andriy Kovalenko, the pinnacle of Ukraine’s Nationwide Safety and Protection Council’s Middle for Countering Disinformation, posted on X on Wednesday: “This morning, an Embraer 190 aircraft of an Azerbaijani airline, flying from Baku to Grozny, was shot down by a Russian air defence system.’ He citied video footage from inside the plane that showed “punctured life vests”.
In the meantime, there was hypothesis in Russian media that the airplane may have been shot down by Russia’s air defences, which mistook it for a Ukrainian drone.
The Fighterbomber Telegram channel, which is believed to be run by Ilya Tumanov, a captain within the Russian military, launched a clip that appeared to indicate holes within the airplane’s wreckage, which some instructed resembled the sort of injury attributable to shelling or an explosion with shrapnel.
Fighterbomber mentioned it was unlikely that the holes had been attributable to a chook strike.
The Kazakh aviation skilled Serik Mukhtybayev instructed the Orda information outlet {that a} chook strike inflicting the airplane crash was “nearly impossible” given the altitude at which the plane was flying when it encountered bother. He pointed to exterior affect as a possible trigger.
Flight-tracking knowledge from Flightradar24.com confirmed the plane making what seemed to be a determine of eight whereas nearing the airport in Aktau, the airplane’s altitude shifting up and down considerably over the past minutes of the flight earlier than hitting the bottom.
Individually, FlightRadar24 mentioned on-line that the airplane had confronted “strong GPS jamming” that “made the aircraft transmit bad ADS-B data”, referring to the data that enables flight-tracking web sites to observe planes in flight. Russia has been blamed prior to now for jamming GPS transmissions within the wider area.
Russia has beforehand employed jamming know-how to defend towards drone assaults, and a few stories recommend that Chechnya got here below such an assault shortly earlier than the crash.
On Wednesday morning, Khamzat Kadyrov, a neighborhood safety official and nephew of Chechen chief Ramzan Kadyrov, wrote on Instagram that “all drones were successfully shot down”.
In latest weeks, Ukrainian drones have focused a number of websites in Chechnya, together with a facility housing native police forces.
The favored Russian pro-war blogger Yuri Podolyaka mentioned holes seen within the wreckage of the airplane had been much like the injury attributable to “anti-aircraft missile system”, including: “Everything points to that.”
The Azerbaijani president, Ilham Aliyev, mentioned it was too quickly to invest on the explanations behind the crash, however that the climate had pressured the airplane to vary from its deliberate course. Russia’s civil aviation authority mentioned preliminary data confirmed the pilots diverted to Aktau after a chook strike led to an emergency on board.
Azerbaijan’s prosecutor normal’s workplace has opened a prison investigation.
The nation’s state information company, Azertac, mentioned an official delegation of the emergency conditions minister, the deputy normal prosecutor and the vice-president of Azerbaijan Airways had been despatched to Aktau to conduct an “on-site investigation”.
Kazakhstan’s most important transport prosecutor, Timur Suleimenov, instructed a briefing within the capital, Astana, that the airplane’s black field, which accommodates flight knowledge to assist decide the reason for a crash, had been discovered, Interfax reported.
A spokesperson for the Kazakh emergencies ministry mentioned on Thursday that specialists had been working to determine the our bodies of those that died within the crash. Of the survivors, 11 remained in intensive care, the spokesperson mentioned. Russia’s emergencies ministry mentioned on Thursday morning it had evacuated 9 Russian nationals who survived the crash, together with one little one, from Aktau to Moscow on a particular flight.
