Wreckage of the Azerbaijan Airlines Embraer at the crash site in southwestern Kazakhstan, 25 December 2024. Photo: EPA-EFE

Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev has confirmed that the Azerbaijan Airlines flight that crashed in Kazakhstan on Wednesday killing 38 people had sustained damage after being shot at from the ground near Grozny, the city in the Russian republic of Chechnya to which it had been flying.

The pilot of the Embraer 190 had lost control of the aircraft after it was shelled, Aliyev said in an interview with Azerbaijani state TV on Sunday, adding that electronic warfare techniques had also rendered the aircraft “uncontrollable”.

Holes discovered in the aircraft’s fuselage after the crash ruled out once and for all the possibility that the accident had been caused by the aircraft colliding with a flock of birds as Russian civil aviation authority Rosaviatsia had initially claimed, Aliyev said, adding that he also found another Russian narrative, namely that the plane crash had been caused by a gas cylinder exploding, to be “unconvincing”.

“Nobody could have imagined that our aircraft would be fired at from the ground in a country friendly to us. Unfortunately, some circles in Russia preferred to stick to this version,” Aliyev said, adding that it was clear that the Russians were attempting to hush up the incident, which he said did “not please anyone”.

While Aliyev stressed that the Azerbaijani plane had been shot down accidentally and that there had been nothing to suggest that the incident had been terror related, he said that the Russian authorities should have publicly admitted their guilt rather than spending the first three days after the crash advancing their “delusional versions” of events.