Today's Edition
Baku (AFP)
The Azerbaijan Airlines plane that crashed in Kazakhstan this week suffered physical "external interference", the airline and Azerbaijan's transport minister said on Friday, citing preliminary results of an investigation.
The jet crashed near the Kazakh city of Aktau on Wednesday, killing 38 of the 67 people on board, after attempting to land at its destination in the Russian city of Grozny and then diverting far off course across the Caspian Sea.
"Based on the opinion of experts and on the words of eyewitnesses, it can be concluded that there was external interference," Azerbaijani's transport minister, Rashad Nabiyev, told reporters.
Azerbaijan Airlines said it had suspended flights to 10 Russian airports, saying preliminary results suggested the crash of Baku-Grozny flight J2-8243 was "due to physical and technical external interference".
Azerbaijan's President Ilham Aliyev said on Friday that he had phoned his Kazakh counterpart Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, with both pledging that the "causes of the crash would be fully examined", according to a statement from Baku.
