Missile event in Kazakhstan on Wed 25th December 2024

Dozens of people have survived a crash involving a plane carrying 67 people in Kazakhstan, local officials say.

Kazakh authorities said 38 people were killed in the crash.

The plane was en route to Grozny in Russia but it was diverted due to fog, the airline told the BBC. The Kremlin said on Thursday that it would not "put forward hypotheses" about the cause of the crash until the investigation was finished.

Azerbaijan Airlines flight J2-8243 caught fire as it attempted to make an emergency landing near the Kazakh city of Aktau.

Footage shows the aircraft heading towards the ground at high speed with its landing gear down, before bursting into flames as it lands.

The airline said the plane "made an emergency landing" about 3km (1.9 miles) from Aktau.

It took off from the Azerbaijani capital Baku at 03:55 GMT on Wednesday, and crashed around 06:28, data from flight-tracking website Flightradar24 showed.

Unconfirmed reports from Russian media said the aircraft might have collided with a flock of birds before crashing.

Azerbaijan's prosecutor general said "all possible scenarios" were being examined and President Ilham Aliyev said it was too early to say anything definitive.

Air defence experts have suggested that the pattern of damage inside and outside the plane indicates Russian air defence active in Grozny may have caused the crash.

"It looks very much like the detonation of an air defence missile to the rear and to the left of the aircraft, if you look at the pattern of shrapnel that we see," Justin Crump of risk advisory company Sibylline told BBC Radio 4.

Azerbaijan Airlines said flights between Baku and the Russian cities of Grozny and Makhachkala would be cancelled pending an investigation into the incident.

The plane's flight data recorder has been recovered, officials say.

Those on board were mostly Azerbaijani nationals, but there were also some passengers from Russia, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan.

A woman who was travelling to spend the holidays with her children in Chechnya, of which Grozny is the capital, died in the crash. One mother, travelling with medical tests for her sick child, is still missing.

A young woman shared her heartache with the BBC's Azerbaijani service as she tried to find out what happened to her father, who was on the flight.

She explained that her father had been travelling with his son, who survived the crash. The son managed to contact his sister, but there was still no news of their father.

Unverified video footage showed survivors crawling out of the wreckage, some with visible injuries.

Both Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan have launched investigations into the incident. Embraer told the BBC it was "ready to assist all relevant authorities".

The BBC has contacted Azerbaijan Airlines for comment.

Embraer, a Brazilian manufacturer, is a smaller rival to Boeing and Airbus, and has a strong safety record.