This Thursday, researchers try to determine the causes of the accident of an Azerbaijani plane in Kazakhstan that left 38 dead, amidst versions that pointed to a possible demolition.
Russia was quick to announce against the “hypotheses” circulating about the cause of the plane’s accident, a Embraer 190 Brazilian-made aircraft of the Kazakhstan Airlines company that crashed near Aktau, in western Kazakhstan.
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According to the company, the plane was carrying 62 passengers and 5 crew members and was on a route between Baku, the Azerbaijani capital, and Grozny, the capital of the Russian Caucasian republic of Chechnya.
An investigation is underway, Kazakh authorities announced, although some military and aviation experts say the aircraft, which was flying over an area of the Russian Caucasus where a drone attack was reported, could have been shot down by a Russian air defense system. . .
Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov assured that it was necessary to “wait for the end of the investigation.”
«It would be a mistake to formulate hypotheses before the conclusions of the research. “We will not do it and no one should,” he told the press.
Kazakhstan, for its part, denounced “speculation” about the accident, about which there is no official hypothesis.
The president of the Kazakh Senate, the upper house of Parliament, Maulen Ashimbayev, declared that “it is not possible” to say at the moment what caused this catastrophe.
«The real experts are investigating and will reach their conclusions. “Neither Kazakhstan, nor Russia, nor Azerbaijan have any interest in hiding information,” he stated, quoted by the official Russian agency TASS.
Lots of shrapnel in the plane crashed in Kazakhstan
At first, Kazakhstan Airlines claimed that a flock of birds was hitting the plane, but withdrew the information.
The Russian civil aviation agency (Rosaviatsia) also mentioned this version on Wednesday.
However, the visible holes in the plane’s fuselage are one of the elements cited in support of the shootdown theory.
A Russian blogger and military expert, Yuri Podoliaka, said on Telegram that the holes visible in the plane’s fuselage were similar to those that could be caused by “an anti-aircraft missile system.”
A former expert from the French air accident investigation agency (BEA) told AFP that there appeared to be “a lot of shrapnel” in the fuselage.
This is “reminiscent of MH17,” he said on condition of anonymity, referring to the Malaysia Airlines flight shot down by a surface-to-air missile over Ukraine in 2014, killing 298 people.
For its part, the regional department of the Ministry of Health of Kazakhstan reported in a statement of the “explosion of a balloon” on board the aircraft, without giving further details.
The Kazakh Interior Ministry opened an investigation for “violation of air transport safety and operation regulations.”
According to the Flightradar24 service, which allows the movement of aircraft to be followed in real time, the device crossed the Caspian Sea, deviating from its normal route, before flying in circles over the area where it crashed.