“This is a great tragedy, which has become a great sorrow for the Azerbaijani people,” President Ilham Aliyev said on Thursday.
In Moscow, the press secretary of the Kremlin, Dmitry Peskov, said: “It would be wrong to put forward any hypotheses about the conclusions of the investigation. We certainly won’t do that, and no one should. We have to wait until the investigation is over. completed.”
The Embraer 190 plane took off from the capital of Azerbaijan, Baku, on Wednesday morning. He was supposed to fly to Grozny in Chechnya, but was diverted due to fog, the airline said.
A passenger who survived told Russian television that he believed the pilot tried to land twice in thick fog over Grozny before “the third time something exploded … part of the plane’s skin came off.”
The plane was diverted to Aktau Airport, about 450 km (280 miles) to the east. The footage shows the plane heading towards the ground at high speed 3km (1.9 miles) from the runway before bursting into flames on landing.
Kazakhstani authorities recovered the flight recorder and an investigation is underway. Shortly after the crash, Russian state television said the most likely cause of the crash was a flock of birds.
But such a collision usually results in the plane sliding toward the nearest airfield, aviation analyst Richard Aboulafia told Reuters. “You can lose control of the plane, but you won’t go off course as a result,” he said.
Justin Crump of risk consultancy Sibylline said damage to the interior and exterior of the plane indicated that Russian air defenses operating in Grozny could have been responsible for the crash.
“It looks very much like an anti-aircraft missile detonation behind and to the left of the aircraft if you look at the fragments that we can see,” he told BBC Radio 4.
