The Embraer 190 jet, traveling from Azerbaijan’s Baku to Grozny in Russia, crashed near the city of Aktau in Kazakhstan after reportedly being rerouted due to fog.
The plane, carrying 62 passengers and five crew members, was forced to make an emergency landing, with 32 survivors rescued by authorities.
The aircraft was supposed to fly northwest from Baku to Grozny but instead flew across the Caspian Sea and went down near the city of Aktau in Kazakhstan.
The plane’s course on the Flight Radar website showed it flying away from its normal route, crossing the Caspian Sea and then circling over the area where it eventually crashed near Aktau.
In the footage shared by Russian media outlet RT, a passenger was seen bleeding from the head, while another attempted to exit the aircraft.
Another video circulating on social media captured a man praying moments before the crash as sounds of panic and the roar of the plane’s engine fill the background.
This video, which is over a minute long, has not been independently verified by HT.com.
The death toll stood at 38, while 29 survivors were hospitalised, though officials from Kazakhstan, Russia, and Azerbaijan cautioned that these numbers could change.
Azerbaijan Airlines plane crash reason
The Kazakh transport ministry said the plane was carrying 37 nationals from Azerbaijan, six from Kazakhstan, three from Kyrgyzstan and 16 from Russia.
The incident appears to have been triggered by a bird strike, Azerbaijan Airlines initially said before withdrawing the statement. “We cannot disclose any investigation results at this time,” the office of Azerbaijan’s prosecutor general said in a statement.
“All possible scenarios are being examined, and the necessary expert analyses are underway,” it added.
Images and videos from the crash show the plane plummeting before bursting into flames as it struck the shoreline, followed by a thick plume of black smoke. Bloodied and injured passengers were seen stumbling away from a piece of the plane’s fuselage that had remained intact.
“I’ll never forget their look, full of pain and despair,” news agency AFP quoted a Kazakh woman as saying, who said she was near where the crashed plane and rushed to the site to help survivors. “A girl pleaded: ‘Save my mother, my mother is back there’,” the woman recalled.
