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“This is a great tragedy that has become a tremendous sorrow for the Azerbaijani people,” President Ilham Aliyev said on Thursday.
In Moscow, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said: “It would be wrong to put forward any hypotheses before the investigation’s conclusions. We, of course, will not do this, and no-one should do this. We need to wait until the investigation is completed.”
The Embraer 190 aircraft took off from the Azerbaijani capital Baku on Wednesday morning. It was due to fly to Grozny in Chechnya but it was diverted because of fog, the airline said.
A surviving passenger told Russian TV he believed the pilot had tried twice to land in dense fog over Grozny before “the third time, something exploded… some of the aircraft skin had blown out”.
The plane was redirected to Aktau airport, some 450km (280 miles) to the east. Footage shows the aircraft heading towards the ground at high speed 3km (1.9 miles) short of the runway, before bursting into flames as it lands.
Kazakh authorities have recovered the flight data recorder and an investigation in under way. Shortly after the crash, reports from Russian state-controlled TV said the most likely cause was a strike from a flock of birds.
But that kind of collision typically results in the plane gliding towards in the nearest airfield, aviation analyst Richard Aboulafia told Reuters news agency. “You can lose control of the plane, but you don’t fly wildly off course as a consequence,” he said.
Justin Crump of risk advisory company Sibylline said the pattern of damage inside and outside the plane indicated that Russian air defence active in Grozny may have caused the crash.
“It looks very much like the detonation of an air defence missile to the rear and to the left of the aircraft, if you look at the pattern of shrapnel that we see,” he told BBC Radio 4.
