Dozens of people were killed but at least 29 survived the crash of a passenger plane in Kazakhstan on Wednesday, according to the country’s authorities and local media.
The jet was carrying 62 passengers and five crew members when it went down near the city of Aktau, Kazakhstan.
“This is a bad situation, 38 people died,” said Deputy Prime Minister Kanat Bozumbayev of Kazakhstan, according to Orda, a local news outlet.
Kazakhstan’s Emergency Situations Ministry said that at least 29 people had survived, including two children, and been hospitalized with various injuries. The ministry posted photographs that it said were from the scene showing firefighters searching through the debris. One photograph appeared to show the tail of the plane largely intact, though it had been separated from the fuselage.
An unverified video from the scene, published by RIA Novosti, a Russian state news agency, showed injured people being pulled from the wreckage. In the video, some passengers were lying on the ground, while others were able to walk away from the plane.
The Azerbaijan Airlines plane had been trying to make an emergency landing in Aktau after hitting a flock of birds, Russia’s state aviation authority said in a statement cited by RIA Novosti soon after the crash. The airline said in a statement that its plane had come down about 1.8 miles away from Aktau.
Kazakhstan’s Emergency Situations Ministry said it had opened an investigation into the causes of the crash. Later Wednesday, Azerbaijan’s Prosecutor General’s Office said in a statement that it had opened a criminal investigation and dispatched a team of investigators to the scene. Similar criminal investigations were also opened in Russia and Kazakhstan.
The Embraer-190 plane was traveling to Grozny, in Russia’s Chechnya republic in the North Caucasus, from Baku, the Azerbaijani capital on the Caspian Sea. RIA Novosti reported that the plane had been rerouted to Kazakhstan because of fog in Grozny.
Azerbaijan Airlines said that it was suspending flights from Baku to Grozny and Makhachkala, in neighboring Dagestan, until investigations into the cause of the crash had concluded.
Earlier Wednesday, Flightradar24, a flight tracking service, said in a post on the social media platform X that the plane had been “exposed to GPS jamming and spoofing near Grozny.” Radar jamming is often used to defend an area against drones. It was not immediately clear whether that played any role in the crash.
According to Andrei Menshenin, an aviation journalist, GPS jamming and spoofing could make piloting uncomfortable but was unlikely to have caused the crash.
“Every day hundreds of planes fly though areas where GPS spoofing is happening,” he said in response to written questions.
On Wednesday, local news outlets in Chechnya reported drone strikes against the republic. Grozny Inform, a state-run news website in Chechnya, cited Khamzat Kadyrov, a local security official, as stating that all of the drones had been shot down. The reports could not be independently verified. Ukrainian drones have hit various targets in Chechnya in recent weeks, including a site belonging to a riot police battalion.
Kazakhstan’s transportation ministry said that the flight’s passengers included 37 Azerbaijani nationals, 16 Russians, six Kazakh citizens and three Kyrgyz nationals.
President Vladimir Putin of Russia called President Ilham Aliyev of Azerbaijan to express condolences, according to the Kremlin. Aliyev — who had been traveling to St. Petersburg, Russia, on Wednesday for a meeting but returned to Azerbaijan because of the crash — declared Thursday a day of mourning for the victims.
Azerbaijan Airlines is the country’s flag carrier, formed from the regional branch of Aeroflot shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The airline inherited a fleet of Soviet planes but has since undergone a transformation, during which time most of its fleet was replaced with modern Western aircraft, according to the carrier’s website.
The airline’s last major episode was in 2005, when an An-140 plane crashed shortly after takeoff, killing 18 passengers and five crew members. Airline officials later said the crash was caused by instrument failure.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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