Azerbaijani Transport Minister Rashad Nabiyev said on Dec. 27 that a preliminary investigation determined that an airliner that crashed on Wednesday experienced an “external impact” before the crash.
The Embraer E190 plane, which was flying from the Azeri capital, Baku, to the Russian city of Grozny, was diverted to Aktau in Kazakhstan and crashed upon landing, killing 38 people. Another 29 people survived.
“Preliminary conclusions by experts point at external impact,” Nabiyev told Azerbaijani media. “The type of weapon used in the impact will be determined during the probe.”
It added Mineralnye, Sochi, Volgograd, Ufa, Samara, Saratov, Nizhny Novgorod, and Vladikavkaz to the list.
The company will continue to fly to Moscow, St. Petersburg, Kazan, and three other Russian cities.
“The aircraft was shot down on Russian territory, in the skies over Grozny. And it is impossible to deny this,” Musabeyov said. “Those who did this should be held criminally liable, compensation must be paid for the deaths and victims.”
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov declined to comment on Musabeyov’s statement.
“The air incident is being investigated, and we don’t believe we have the right to make any assessments until the conclusions are made as a result of the investigation,” Peskov told reporters in a conference call.
On Friday, Dmitry Yadrov, head of Russia’s civil aviation authority, Rosaviatsia, said a Ukrainian drone attack had been underway in the Grozny area as the Azerbaijan Airlines plane was preparing to land in thick fog. The drone attack prompted authorities to close the area to air traffic, Yadrov said.
Yadrov said that after the captain made two unsuccessful landing attempts, he was offered alternative airports but chose to fly across the Caspian Sea to Aktau in Kazakhstan. It crashed two miles from Aktau.
He did not comment on claims the plane had been hit by anti-aircraft or anti-drone fire.
The Prosecutor General’s Office of Azerbaijan said in a statement that Azeri investigators were working in Grozny as part of a tri-national investigation.
Cellphone footage circulating online appeared to show the aircraft making a steep descent before crashing into the ground.
Several experts who have analyzed footage of the crash have suggested the plane was hit by a weapon.
Mark Zee of OPSGroup, which monitors the world’s airspace for risks, said the airliner was almost certainly hit by a surface-to-air missile (SAM).
He said, “[There’s] much more to investigate, but at [a] high level we'd put the probability of it being a SAM attack on the aircraft at being well into the 90-99% bracket.”
Ukrainian drones had previously attacked Grozny and other regions in the North Caucasus, and Russian air defenses used SAMs to shoot them down.
Yan Matveyev, an independent Russian military expert, said images of the crashed plane’s tail suggested damage compatible with shrapnel from a small SAM, such as the Pantsyr-S1 air defense system.
“It looks like the tail section of the plane was damaged by some missile fragments,” Matveyev said.
There have been several incidents over the years of civilian airliners being accidentally shot down by military forces in various parts of the world.
In January 2020, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps acknowledged it accidentally shot down a Ukrainian jet that had just taken off from Tehran airport, killing all 176 people aboard.
In July 1988, the U.S.S. Vincennes, a warship on duty in the Persian Gulf, mistakenly shot down an Iranian airliner, killing all 290 on board.
