Grozny authorities are to blame for crash of AZAL plane - Ilham Aliyev

On Monday, President Ilham Aliyev received family members of the dead crew of the AZAL passenger plane and injured flight attendants.

He repeated his claims to the Russian side that the pilots were not warned about the danger in the airspace near the city of Grozny. He said a similar incident had occurred 10 days earlier in the same area and the AZAL plane had turned back. ‘Why was the flight crew not warned this time? Naturally, the investigation will show this,’ Aliyev noted.

‘The concealment of this event by Russian state agencies and references to absurd versions cause us both surprise, regret and quite justified anger. Innocent people died,’ Aliyev emphasised.

‘All the questions that have not been opened so far will be revealed. It is clear that the aircraft was taken out of control by means of electronic warfare and was damaged as a result of shelling from the ground.  But why was the plane sent to Aktau? We have no information about this yet. It happened on the basis of the decision of the local dispatchers, or the pilots themselves realised that the electronic warfare equipment in Russian airspace would not allow them to land and made this choice themselves. We have no information about this yet. Of course, all this information will be available once the ‘black boxes’ are opened.

‘We behaved on principle and will demand justice and punishment to those responsible for the deaths of Azerbaijani citizens in this crash. If Grozny had taken timely measures to close the airspace, if the ground services had observed all the rules and if there had been coordination between the military and state structures of the Russian Federation, this tragedy would not have happened.

I do not want to disclose all the materials of the criminal case yet, I have been informed about its preliminary investigation and results, but I can say with certainty that the blame for this accident lies with the representatives of Russia. We demand justice, we demand punishment of the guilty, we demand full transparency,’ Aliyev emphasised.

Sending the ‘black boxes’ to Brazil also shows that we demand objectivity. If we had seen the desire of official circles of the Russian Federation to objectively investigate this tragedy from the first minutes or hours, we would probably have agreed to the study of the ‘black boxes’ by the Interstate Aviation Committee.

‘But when we saw attempts to refer to some birds or a gas cylinder explosion, I and the Azerbaijani public had serious doubts about the objectivity of this structure,’ Aliyev said.

In Brazil, the process of investigating the aircraft's ‘black boxes’ is underway.  ‘At our insistence, this process is being carried out in Brazil.  We are categorically against the opening of ‘black boxes’ by the Interstate Aviation Committee, despite all suggestions and insistence. Because the objectivity could have been questioned because of the conflict of interest. Therefore, with the participation of representatives of Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Russia in Brazil, the analysis of ‘black boxes’ has been started and information about it will be provided in the near future,’ Aliyev said.

To conclude, he expressed condolences to the families of the crew members and promised them all possible support from the state.