Aviation experts believe Wednesday’s crash of an Azerbaijan Airlines flight while it was attempting to make an emergency landing in Aktau, Kazakhstan, was likely caused by inadvertent targeting by Russian air defense systems, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal.
Mark Zee, a representative of the United Kingdom-based Osprey Flight Solutions, told the newspaper that images of the debris field and fuselage damage suggested a surface-to-air missile caused the incident.
“Much more to investigate, but at high level we’d put the probability of it being a SAM attack on the aircraft at being well into the 90-99% bracket,” he said.
Zee’s conclusion was echoed by his firm in a statement to clients, asserting that the jet “was likely shot down by a Russian military air-defense system.”
The Embraer 190 was en route from Baku to the Chechen city of Grozny, where the Kremlin’s armed forces have encountered several Ukrainian drone incursions in recent weeks.
Flightradar24.com said in an online post that the aircraft also encountered “strong GPS jamming” while it was in operation.
Of the 67 passengers on board, 38 tragically lost their lives in the accident.
