The aviation agency claims that Grozny, where the plane was due to land, was targeted by Ukrainian drones and that is why it ordered the airspace to be cleared. The crash killed 38 people; the fuselage showed perforations.
(DW) The Russian aviation agency Rosaviatsiya acknowledged on Friday (27/12) that the crash of an Embraer aircraft in Kazakhstan, which resulted in the deaths of 38 people, occurred while the region was the target of a military operation related to the war in Ukraine – without, however, explicitly blaming Russia for the accident.
According to the agency, Ukrainian drones attacked two cities in the Russian region of Chechnya. One of them was Grozny, the destination of Azerbaijan Airlines (Azal) flight J2-8243, which took off on Wednesday from Baku in Azerbaijan.
In response to the alleged attack, Rosaviatsiya says it has decided to apply a contingency plan in the areas that coincide with the path of the plane carrying civilians.
“The situation in the Grozny airport area was extremely complex. Ukrainian drones were carrying out terrorist attacks on the cities of Grozny and Vladikavkaz at the time,” said the head of the agency, Dmitri Yadrov, quoted by the Russian state agency Tass.
As a result, Yadrov explained, Grozny airport ordered the “immediate departure of all aircraft from the area”, suspending arrivals and departures, but without saying when this happened.
The captain of the Azerbaijani flight even tried to land twice, without success. “There was a very dense fog, there was no visibility at a height of 500 meters,” he said, adding that the air traffic controllers had suggested other airport options, but that the captain had decided to continue on to Aktau, in Kazakhstan, on the other side of the Caspian Sea.
The airline spoke of “external physical and technical interference”
On Thursday, Azerbaijani government sources speaking on condition of anonymity told news agencies of their suspicion that the plane may have been hit by shrapnel from a Russian anti-aircraft missile while in the airspace of the city of Grozny.
Four anonymous sources in the Azerbaijani government told Reuters that preliminary results of the investigation suggested that the aircraft had been mistakenly attacked by Russian military personnel.
In recent weeks, Ukrainian drones have attacked several sites in Chechnya, including a facility housing police forces.
Earlier on Friday, the Azal airline said that an investigation into the crash concluded that there had been “external physical and technical interference”. The company suspended flights to ten Russian airports, based on the “preliminary results of the investigation into the Embraer 190 crash”.
Also on Friday, the airline flydubai announced the suspension of flights to the Russian airports of Sochi and Mineralnie Vody, Reuters reported.
Surviving passengers report explosion
To Reuters, one of the 29 passengers who survived the crash reported hearing at least one large explosion as the plane approached Grozny airport. Frightened, he began to pray and prepare to die.
“I thought the plane was going to disintegrate,” said Subhonkul Rakhimov, who is in hospital. “It was as if [the plane] was drunk, it wasn’t the same anymore.”
A similar story was told by a survivor to the Russian state channel RT. He said that the aircraft made three attempts to land in Grozny and that on the third approach “something exploded…. I wouldn’t say it was inside the plane” and that a piece of shrapnel flew between his legs and pierced a life jacket.
The crash
The Embraer 190 left Baku before dawn with 62 passengers and five crew. The short flight to Grozny in the northwest was apparently uneventful for half an hour, when the aircraft “encountered significant GPS interference”, according to Flightradar24, a website that tracks air traffic around the world.
Flightradar24 said that until about 20 minutes before the crash, it sometimes received no data from the plane and, on other occasions, it received data in which details about its position were missing or inaccurate.
“The aircraft was exposed to GPS interference and falsification near Grozny,” Flightradar24 pointed out. Although it is unlikely that these measures caused the crash, they are signs that defense efforts against a drone attack were underway on the ground.
Images circulating on social media show the plane descending in Aktau, Kazakhstan, in a landing position and catching fire as it crashed into the ground. Injured passengers could be seen emerging from a part of the fuselage that remained intact.
On the day of the accident, the Russian aviation agency said in a statement that it had preliminary information that the pilot had decided to make an emergency landing after a bird crashed into the aircraft.
Another version was that the accident was related to the explosion of an oxygen balloon, something that was confirmed by the Kazakh authorities.
But in the photos circulating of the crash, it is possible to see perforations in the fuselage of the aircraft, as if it had been machine-gunned.
Brazilian experts were expected on Friday to help with the investigation into the crash of the Brazilian-made plane.
The accusations surrounding the plane crash have also brought back memories of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17, which was shot down over eastern Ukraine in 2014, killing 298 people. An international investigation found that an anti-aircraft missile launched by Russian forces caused the crash. Moscow refuted the accusations.
ra/bl (EFE, AFP, Reuters, DW)