Authorities said that a passenger plane transporting 67 people from Azerbaijan to Russia crashed near Kazakhstan on Wednesday, killing dozens of people.
Kazakhstan’s Emergencies Ministry posted on Telegram that 62 passengers and five crew members were on board the Azerbaijan Airlines flight that crashed close to the city of Aktau in southwest Kazakhstan. Later, the Kazakh Health Ministry released a list of 29 survivors, two of them were minors.
Tengrinews, a Kazakh news outlet, reported that 38 persons were killed in the crash, according to Kazakhstan’s Deputy Prime Minister Kanat Bozumbayev.
According to Bozumbayev, the bodies were “mostly burnt” and would be identified at a morgue, as reported by Tengrinews.
According to the Kazakh Transport Ministry, the passengers included 37 Azerbaijani nationals, 16 Russians, 6 Kazakh citizens, and 3 Kyrgyz people, according to the Russian state news outlet Ria Novosti.
Fog caused the flight to be diverted to the Russian city of Makhachkala, approximately 100 miles east of Gronzny, from Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, to Grozny in the Chechnya area of Russia, the Grozny airport’s press department reported the Russian state news agency Tass.
Azerbaijan Airlines sent a statement on Telegram stating that the Embraer 190 aircraft performed an emergency landing about 1.8 miles from the city of Aktau.
Russia’s aviation regulator, Rosaviatsia, released a statement on Telegram stating that preliminary inquiry revealed the plane crashed with birds and was diverted to Aktau due to an emergency on board.
Azerbaijan Airlines said in a statement posted on Telegram that the inquiry is still ongoing and that more details about the incident will be made public.
At the crash scene, a fire was present, but it was “completely extinguished,” according to the Kazakh Emergencies Ministry.
It further stated that the emergency reaction comprised 45 pieces of equipment and 150 personnel in total.
Russian President Vladimir Putin contacted his Azerbaijani counterpart, Ilham Aliyev, to offer his condolences, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said.
Aliyev had to depart St. Petersburg, where he had been scheduled to attend a conference, Peskov said, adding, “We have deep sympathy for those who lost their loved ones in this air crash and wish a speedy recovery to those who survived.”
Aliyev proclaimed Thursday to be Azerbaijan’s national day of mourning.
In a post on his Telegram account Wednesday morning, Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov offered his sympathies to the families of the passengers who had died.
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