Sources claim that Russian air defense system shot down Azerbaijan Airlines plane
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.
Flight J2-8243 went down near the town of Aktau after straying from an area of Russia where Moscow has used anti-aircraft defense systems against Ukrainian drone attacks in recent months.
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. The nearest Russian airport on the plane’s flight path, Makhachkala, was closed on Wednesday morning.
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One of the Azerbaijani sources familiar with Azerbaijan’s investigation into the crash told Reuters that preliminary results showed the plane was struck by a Russian Pantsir-S air defence system. 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,” the source said.
Three other sources confirmed that the Azeri investigation had come to the same preliminary conclusion.
Kazakh Deputy Prime Minister Qanat Bozymbaev said he could neither confirm nor deny the thesis that Russian air defences downed the plane.
The Kremlin 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.
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