“This can be a nice tragedy that has turn out to be an amazing sorrow for the Azerbaijani individuals,” President Ilham Aliyev stated on Thursday.
In Moscow, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov stated: “It will be unsuitable to place ahead any hypotheses earlier than the investigation’s conclusions. We, after all, is not going to do that, and no-one ought to do that. We have to wait till the investigation is accomplished.”
The Embraer 190 plane took off from the Azerbaijani capital Baku on Wednesday morning. It was as a result of fly to Grozny in Chechnya however it was diverted due to fog, the airline stated.
A surviving passenger advised Russian TV he believed the pilot had tried twice to land in dense fog over Grozny earlier than “the third time, one thing exploded… a number of the plane pores and skin had blown out”.
The aircraft was redirected to Aktau airport, some 450km (280 miles) to the east. Footage reveals the plane heading in direction of the bottom at excessive pace 3km (1.9 miles) in need of the runway, earlier than bursting into flames because it lands.
Kazakh authorities have recovered the flight information recorder and an investigation in beneath manner. Shortly after the crash, stories from Russian state-controlled TV stated the almost definitely trigger was a strike from a flock of birds.
However that sort of collision sometimes ends in the aircraft gliding in direction of within the nearest airfield, aviation analyst Richard Aboulafia advised Reuters information company. “You may lose management of the aircraft, however you do not fly wildly off target as a consequence,” he stated.
Justin Crump of threat advisory firm Sibylline stated the sample of injury inside and out of doors the aircraft indicated that Russian air defence lively in Grozny might have precipitated the crash.
“It seems very very like the detonation of an air defence missile to the rear and to the left of the plane, in case you take a look at the sample of shrapnel that we see,” he advised BBC Radio 4.
