Plane crash with 38 dead: USA and Azerbaijan suspect Russian misfire
By Friedemann Kohler
Aktau/Baku - Like Azerbaijan, the USA is not ruling out a Russian air defense miss as the cause of the crash of an Azerbaijani passenger plane in Kazakhstan.
According to a US government representative, initial indications point to a shoot-down, as reported by CNN and ABC News, among others. If the initial indications are confirmed, it is conceivable that poorly trained Russian units had mistaken the target when defending against Ukrainian drones, the official said.
The crash near the Kazakh city of Aktau on the Caspian Sea on Wednesday killed 38 of the 67 people on board .
29 people survived, many of them seriously injured. The Embraer 190 aircraft operated by Azerbaijan Airlines was supposed to be flying from the capital Baku to Grozny in the Russian republic of Chechnya. That morning, Russian air defense was deployed in several regions in the North Caucasus due to drones from Ukraine.
At an early stage, military bloggers from Russia as well as Ukrainian representatives pointed out the possibility of the aircraft being damaged by Russian air defense. Internet aircraft trackers such as Flightradar24 reported that the GPS data on the exact position of the aircraft over Russia had been disrupted.
Images of the tail of the wreckage showed small holes that look like impacts from anti-aircraft missile fragments.
Baku leaks allegations
In an initial reaction, the Kremlin warned against premature speculation.
On Thursday afternoon, however, the Azerbaijani leadership massively spread the assumption that the plane had been hit by a Russian Panzir-S anti-aircraft missile.
Citing unnamed government representatives in Baku, local and international media reported that the plane had been damaged on its approach to Grozny.
There was particular outrage in Azerbaijan that the plane was allegedly denied an emergency landing at nearby Russian airports due to bad weather.
The pilots had to maneuver the almost uncontrollable aircraft over the Caspian Sea to Aktau. Altitude and speed fluctuated considerably.
During an attempted landing in Aktau, the plane crashed.