Azerbaijan’s President Has Directly Blamed Russia For The Plane Crash That Killed 38 People
“We can clearly say today that the plane was shot down by Russia,” Azerbaijan’s president Ilham Aliyev said.
Azerbaijan’s president Ilham Aliyev has directly blamed Russia for the Azerbaijan Airlines plane crash in Kazakhstan on Dec. 25 that killed 38 people, saying the plane was shot down by Russia.
“We can clearly say today that the plane was shot down by Russia,” Aliyev said in a TV interview on Sunday. Dec. 29, according to Azerbaijan’s state news agency, the New York Times reported.
He said that although Russia had hit the plane by accident, it had been slow to respond and accept responsibility.
“Unfortunately, for the first three days, we heard nothing from Russia except for some absurd theories,” Aliyev said.
The Kremlin had said in a statement on Saturday Dec. 28 that Russian President Vladimir Putin had called Aliyev and “offered his apologies for the “tragic accident” occurring in Russian airspace.
However, Putin did not explicitly acknowledge any Russian responsibility for the crash.
The Kremlin said Putin said that Russian air defense systems had begun to repulse an attack by Ukrainian drones on Grozny airport when the plane was arriving, the New York Times reported.
Flight J2-8243, which had 67 people on board, including 62 passengers and five crew members, was flying from Baku, Azerbaijan, to Grozny, Russia.
However, the Embraer 190 jet crashed hundreds of kilometers off its scheduled route near Aktau in Kazakhstan on the opposite side of the Caspian Sea, killing 38 people and leaving 29 survivors.
Survivors have described hearing a banging noise outside the plane before it crashed.
Aviation experts and US officials have said that a Russian air defense missile may have accidentally downed the plane.
Aliyev had said the aircraft experienced “external physical and technical interference” when it entered Russian airspace, which resulted in “complete loss of control,” multiple punctures in the fuselage and foreign particles entering the cabin that injured passengers.
Speaking on Sunday, Aliyev issued three demands, calling on Russia to apologize to Azerbaijan, acknowledge its guilt and ensure those responsible are punished, adding that Russia had only done the first of the three.
The Kremlin did not immediately respond to Aliyev’s latest comments.
In 2020, when Azerbaijan’s military mistakenly shot down a Russian military helicopter and killed two Russian soldiers, Aliyev had accepted responsibility and offered compensation, the New York Times reported.
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Isha Jain
Kassy Cho
Isha Jain
