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‘Foreign metal objects’ led to the crash of Azerbaijan Airlines flight, preliminary report shows [1]
['Arzu Geybullayeva']
Date: 2025-02-06
On December 25, 2024, flight number J2-8243, on board the Embraer 190 operated by Azerbaijan Airlines (AZAL), crashed near the city of Aqtau in Kazakhstan. The flight out of Baku was en route to Grozny, the capital of Chechnya. Out of 67 people (including the crew) on board, 38 died. While at first, it was not clear what caused the crash, video footage and photos from the scene indicated that a missile strike was the cause.
The government of Azerbaijan demanded answers over the AZAL crash, while the initial response from the Kremlin blamed it on a bird strike. The investigations thus far confirmed the pilots had to make an emergency landing after reporting two impacts.
Soon after the crash, the Kazakh authorities established a government commission, which included international experts, to investigate the cause of the incident. A preliminary report, initially scheduled for release in January 2025, was finally published on February 4, concluding that the crash was due to”foreign metal objects” striking the plane.
Meanwhile, an Azerbaijani government source told Reuters that “the Azerbaijani side possesses a fragment of a Pantsir-S missile, which was extracted from the aircraft and identified through international expertise.”
Ongoing investigations
On December 29, in an interview with the state television channel AzTV, President of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev reiterated demands to the Russian government: an apology, acknowledgement of guilt, punishment of all those accountable, and compensation to the government, injured passengers, and crew members.
Flight #J28243 that crashed near Aktau Airport in Kazakhstan is an Azerbaijan Airlines Embraer ERJ-190 with registration 4K-AZ65.#J28243 took off from Baku at 03:55 UTC time and was flying to Grozny. The aircraft was exposed to strong GPS jamming which made the aircraft… pic.twitter.com/rM1Q0jmMPt — Flightradar24 (@flightradar24) December 25, 2024
By the time visual footage from the crash site was released, it was clear that the crash did not happen because of foggy weather or a bird strike.
Increasing speculation in Russian media that the Baku-Grozny Azerbaijan Airlines flight was shot down by Russian air defenses that mistook it for a Ukrainian drone. Footage of the damage to the fuselage. pic.twitter.com/QzsDbCLDtS — Yaroslav Trofimov (@yarotrof) December 25, 2024
One user on X shared a video of the plane after the crash showing visible holes, and asked whether all was sorted with the birds referred to in preliminary statements by Russian authorities:
You are done with the birds?
On social media platforms, users in discussions over the cause of the plane crash accused the government of Azerbaijan of restricting movement because of closed land borders. Some commentators said that had the land borders been open, those on the flight would have taken the land route, given the distance between Baku and Grozny of 570 kilometers (354 miles). Azerbaijan's land borders have been closed for over four years, with security concerns being cited as the reason. This has forced both citizens and visitors to travel by air as the only available option to enter and exit the country. On December 27, 2024, two days after the AZAL crash, the government extended the quarantine regime until April 1.
Others wondered why a passenger flight was allowed to take off in the first place when its route was through a military zone. According to reporting by Radio Liberty and other international news outlets/organizations on the day of the accident, the missile hit was, in all likelihood, a retaliatory measure — “an air-defense missile defending against an alleged Ukrainian drone attack,” reported Radio Liberty.
Russian President Vladimir Putin himself later acknowledged that at the time the plane was attempting to land at Grozny airport, Russian air defence systems were repelling drone attacks from Ukraine across Grozny, Mozdok and Vladikavkaz, according to the readout of a phone conversation between Putin and President Aliyev on December 28.
On January 6, during a meeting with families of the deceased crew members, President Aliyev questioned the reasons why the flight crew was not informed on time:
In Grozny, the “Kovyor operation” — an operation to close the airspace — was initiated after the plane was fired upon from the ground. This clearly indicates the presence of serious criminal issues. If Russian airspace was under threat, the captain of the plane should have been promptly informed. The airspace should have been closed immediately, and the plane should have been instructed to turn back.
During the same meeting, President Aliyev said 10 days prior to the crash, another AZAL flight was warned. “Why was this information not communicated to the crew this time?” asked the Azerbaijani president.
The report published on February 4 confirmed all initial suspicions and that Russian air traffic controllers initiated a kovyor (“carpet”) protocol, which shuts down air traffic because of threats, eight minutes after the initial impacts.
An apology that was not
On December 28, Russia's President Putin had a phone call with his counterpart. According to the readout , although Putin apologized for the tragic incident occurring in Russian airspace, expressed his deep and sincere condolences to the families of the victims and wished a speedy recovery to the injured, no responsibility for the crash was taken.
“What we see is recognition of the incident without admission of guilt, which seems to have left Baku and its allies dissatisfied,” wrote Alexander Baunov, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center on X. The next day, when President Aliyev spoke to the state television channel, he did not mention his call with President Putin but repeated that the Kremlin's delayed initial response contained “absurd theories”:
Of course, our plane was hit by accident. Of course, there can be no talk of a deliberate act of terror here. Therefore, admitting guilt, apologizing in a timely manner to Azerbaijan, which is considered a friendly country, and informing the public about this — these were measures and steps that should have been taken. Unfortunately, for the first three days, we heard nothing from Russia except for some absurd theories.
In the meantime, following the release of the preliminary report on February 4, Russia’s Federal Air Transport Agency (Rosaviatsiya) said the report was “inconclusive.” Although it confirmed that “the aircraft sustained damage from external impact,” it stated that the cause of the impact remained unclear as investigations continued and that the “Russian Federation has not had the opportunity to examine [the objects] because it has not received these objects for an expert evaluation.”
Russian Presidential Spokesman Dmitry Peskov said, “The Russian presidential administration considers it impossible to comment on this issue.”
It may take up to 12 months for the full investigation to be completed. Ten years ago, on July 17, 2014, a Russian Buk missile downed a Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 over eastern Ukraine, killing all passengers and crew on board. Two years later, a team of international criminal investigators from the Netherlands, Australia, Malaysia, Belgium and Ukraine said “evidence showed the Buk missile had been brought in from Russian territory and was fired from a field controlled by Russian-backed separatists,” according to BBC. In 2018, the Dutch prosecutors concluded the source of the missile was a Russian military unit. Russia denied the claim, calling the investigations “biased and politically motivated.” In 2019, four suspects were identified as the perpetrators, although the MH17 Joint Investigation Team (JIT) suspected more people were involved. In November 2022, the district Court of The Hague sentenced three military leaders of the so-called Donetsk People's Republic (DPR) to life imprisonment in absentia. A fourth suspect was acquitted. In February 2023, JIT shared final findings, in which the team concluded there were “strong indications that the Russian president decided on supplying the Buk TELAR to the DPR separatists.”
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[1] Url:
https://globalvoices.org/2025/02/06/foreign-metal-objects-led-to-the-crash-of-azerbaijan-airlines-flight-preliminary-report-shows/
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