Speculation was mounting on Friday that the Russian military may have had a role in it Air crash of Azerbaijan Airlines that killed 38 people and left 29 survivors injured in Kazakhstan on Christmas Day, with experts casting doubt on Moscow’s suggestion that a bird strike was to blame.
Azerbaijan Airlines Flight 8243, an Embraer 190, was flying from Azerbaijan’s capital Baku to the city of Grozny in Russia’s North Caucasus region on Wednesday when it was diverted for reasons not yet known clear two days later. At some point during the flight, the aircraft’s GPS tracking was locked, causing significant deviations in the flight path.
The plane crashed while trying to reach another airport in Aktau, in western Kazakhstan, after flying east across the Caspian Sea. It came down and exploded in a ball of flames only about two miles from the Aktau airport.
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Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan and Russia opened investigations into the cause of the crash, but it was Russia that faced the most pointed questions two days later. The Kremlin has urged people not to jump to conclusions, and President Ilham Aliyev of Azerbaijan, who has forged closer ties between his country and Russia during his two decades in power, also said it was too early to speculate .
“The information provided to me is that the plane changed its course between Baku and Grozny due to worsening weather conditions and headed to Aktau Airport, where it crashed in land,” he said, as Russia’s civil aviation authority, Rosaviatsia, suggested the bird strike. theory
But a US official told CBS News there were early indications that a Russian anti-aircraft system may have hit the plane in a region where Ukrainian and Russian forces have exchanged drone and rocket fire for months. The official, who spoke to CBS News on condition of anonymity, said that if this proved true, it would further underscore Russia’s recklessness in its ongoing invasion of Ukraine.
Independent aviation experts also cast doubt on the bird strike theory and pointed to the damage seen on the plane’s fuselage as evidence of a more sinister possible explanation.
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“It certainly doesn’t look like a flock of birds,” said CBS News aviation safety analyst Robert Sumwalt, a former chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board.
“Birds don’t fly at the kind of altitude that the initial damage occurred on this aircraft,” Sumwalt added.
Instead, the damage has the hallmarks of shrapnel from an airborne weapon, and British military veteran and security analyst Justin Crump told CBS News affiliate BBC News that “the most likely hypothesis is that it was hit by an air defense missile, almost certainly Russian.”
Some survivors of the crash said they heard an explosion.
“Ukrainian drones were active at the time, and that’s commensurate with everything we’ve seen with pilots communicating with air traffic control,” Crump told the BBC.
Azamat Sarsenbayev/REUTERS
Ukraine has it relied heavily on explosive drones to strike Russian military and infrastructure targets inside the much larger neighboring country’s western territory over the past year, and Russia often shoots down the weapons with its air defense systems.
For many observers, the circumstances of the Azerbaijan Airlines crash and the damage to the wreckage of the plane recalled the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 in 2014. That passenger plane was hit by a missile fired by Russian-backed forces over eastern Ukraine, killing all 298 people on board.
Among those seeking answers in the latest disaster in Kazakhstan are survivors of the crash, including a man who said from a hospital bed that he was sitting next to his wife on the plane when it took off to crash
“I haven’t seen my wife since,” he said.
Investigators have recovered the two so-called “black boxes” (the flight data and the cockpit voice recorders) from the crash site. Experts from Brazil, where the plane was built, were due to arrive in Kazakhstan on Friday to help them retrieve and analyze the information.
As formal investigations intensified, Ukraine’s government on Friday called for Russia to be held responsible for the crash, with Azerbaijan Airlines reportedly halting scheduled services to seven Russian cities.
