Christmas Day Disaster, as Plane Crash Claims Scores

By Reuters

Dozens of people are feared dead after a plane carrying 62 passengers and five crew members crashed near the city of Aktau in Kazakhstan on earlier today, December 25, 2024, the country’s authorities reported.

Kazakhstan’s Emergency Situations Ministry said that at least 29 people had survived, including two children, and that they had been hospitalized with various injuries.

An unverified video from the scene, published by RIA Novosti, a Russian state news agency, showed injured people being pulled from the wreckage.

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.

The airline said in a statement that its plane had come down about 1.8 miles away from Aktau.

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.

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 this had played any role in the crash.

Earlier, 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 V. Putin of Russia called Ilham Aliyev, his Azerbaijani counterpart, to express condolences for the crash victims, according to Dmitri S. Peskov, the Kremlin’s spokesman. Mr. Aliyev had been in St. Petersburg, Russia, on Wednesday for a gathering of leaders of some former Soviet states, but returned to Azerbaijan because of the crash, the Kremlin said.

Kazakhstan’s Emergency Situations Ministry initially said 25 people had survived the crash, but later revised that number to 29 as emergency workers continued their search and rescue efforts. The ministry said it had opened an investigation.

Russia’s state aviation authority said the Azerbaijan Airlines plane had tried to make an emergency landing. The Kazakh authorities said that at least 29 people survived.

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