A passenger on the Azerbaijan Airlines plane that crashed in Kazakhstan told Reuters there was at least one loud bang as it approached its original destination of Grozny in southern Russia.
Flight J2-8243 crashed in a ball of fire near the city of Aktau in Kazakhstan on Wednesday after diverting from an area in southern Russia where Moscow has repeatedly used air defense systems against Ukrainian drones.
“I thought the plane was going to break up,” Subhonkul Rakhimov, one of the passengers, told Reuters from the hospital. He said he had begun reciting prayers and preparing for the end after hearing the bang.
At least 38 people were killed while 29 survived.
Russia has said it is important to wait until the official investigation has completed its work to understand what happened.
Four sources with knowledge of the preliminary findings of Azerbaijan’s investigation into the disaster told Reuters on Thursday that Russian air defenses had shot it down by mistake.
Azerbaijan Airlines suspended several flights to Russian cities on Friday and said it believed the crash was caused by “physical and technical external interference.”
After the loud bang, the plane behaved strangely as if it was drunk, Rakhimov said.
“It looked like he was drunk – it wasn’t the same plane anymore,” he said.
The Embraer passenger jet flew from Azerbaijan’s capital Baku to Grozny in Russia’s southern Chechnya region, before splashing hundreds of miles across the Caspian Sea.
It crashed on the opposite bank of the Caspian, after which Russia’s aviation watchdog said it was an emergency possibly caused by a bird strike.
After the chaos of the crash landing, there was silence before the wounded began to moan, Rakhimov said.
Asked about reports that Russian air defenses had accidentally shot down the plane, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Friday he had nothing to add until the official investigation draws its conclusions. Till then he does not want to make any assessment.
Russia’s aviation watchdog Rosaviatsia said the plane’s captain was offered other airports to land, but he chose Aktau, Kazakhstan. It said it would provide extensive assistance to the Kazakh and Azerbaijani investigations into the crash.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
