A passenger plane flying from the Azerbaijani capital Baku to Grozny, the capital of Chechnya, crashed while coming into land at Aqtau Airport in southwestern Kazakhstan on Wednesday, local Telegram channel Orda has reported.
The 67 people on board — 62 passengers and five crew members — included 16 Russians, 37 Azerbaijanis, six Kazakhs and three Kyrgyz, state-affiliated news outlet RBC said. Of those, 29 are known to have survived, according to the Kazakh Emergency Situations Ministry, over 20 of whom have been hospitalised.
At least 38 people were killed in the crash, Kazakhstan’s Deputy Prime Minister Qanat Bozymbaev, who heads the commission looking into the crash, told reporters on Wednesday, adding that the situation was “dire”.
The Azerbaijan Airlines Embraer 190 was on a scheduled flight to Grozny, in the North Caucasus, but was diverted to Makhachkala, in neighbouring Dagestan, and then to Aqtau due to fog. Kazaeronavigatsia, a company which provides air navigation services in Kazakhstan, said the plane had transmitted an alarm signal after colliding with a flock of birds, causing the navigation system to malfunction.
Footage has since emerged online which appears to show holes in the tail of the crashed plane, with Telegram channel Baza commenting that this looked like the aftermath of shelling or an explosion.
No official cause of the Azerbaijan Airlines plane crash has yet been given.
There are also unconfirmed reports of a Ukrainian attack on Chechnya early on Wednesday. Baza wrote that Grozny Airport was closed to incoming aircraft, though the authorities initially denied any connection between the incident and a drone attack.
One surviving passenger told propaganda outlet RT that the pilot had tried to land the plane in Grozny three times, saying: “The third time something exploded.”
Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev has cut short his engagements at a CIS summit in Russia to return to Baku, while the authorities in Moscow and Grozny have sent their condolences.