ASTANA (Reuters) – An Azerbaijani passenger plane that crashed in December after being diverted from Russia to Kazakhstan had suffered damage “probably caused by external objects”, according to a preliminary report published on a Kazakh government website on Tuesday.
Thirty-eight people were killed when the Azerbaijan Airlines passenger plane crashed on Dec. 25 near the city of Aktau in Kazakhstan after diverting across the Caspian Sea from southern Russia.
Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev said on Dec. 29 that the plane had been damaged by accidental shooting from the ground in Russia. Moscow has not confirmed this.
(Reporting by Tamara Vaal, Ksenia Orlova and Gleb Stolyarov; Writing by Mark Trevelyan)
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