“In particular, according to the website Flightradar24, the plane “encountered significant GPS interference” about half an hour after takeoff”, — write: www.radiosvoboda.org
Their assessment is based on footage of the plane showing holes in the plane’s tail and comments from survivors, as well as reports of an alleged drone attack on Grozny around the time the plane was due to land.
In particular, Ruslan Leviev, the founder of the investigative group Conflict Intelligence Team, said on the air of the Russian channel “Rain” that the holes in the plane are typical traces of anti-aircraft missiles.
The Embraer 190 took off from Baku before dawn with 62 passengers and five crew members. According to Flightradar24, the plane “encountered significant GPS interference” about half an hour after takeoff. From then until about 20 minutes before the crash, Flightradar24 sometimes received no data from the plane at all, and sometimes received data that lacked or inaccurate location details.
“The aircraft experienced GPS jamming and spoofing near Grozny,” reports Flightradar24.
While these measures alone are unlikely to have caused the disaster, they are signs that efforts may have been made on the ground to defend against a drone attack.
Reports of the drone attack on Grozny around the time the plane was in the area were published by both the opposition Chechen Telegram channels and the Russian secret service-linked Baza channel. Open source researchers confirmed the drone strike in Chechnya through geolocation.
In a post on Instagram, the secretary of the Security Council of Chechnya, Khamzat Kadyrov, nephew of regional leader Ramzan Kadyrov, announced that the drone attack had been successfully repelled. The post was later deleted.
The state news publication Grozny-inform, probably also referring to the Instagram post, quoted Khamzat Kadyrov as saying that all drones had been shot down.
On December 25, the Cheka-OGPU channel, recognized in Russia as a “foreign agent”, published an alleged transcript of a radio exchange between the cockpit crew and the Grozny air traffic controller, in which the crew reported that they had lost control of the plane due to a “bird collision”.
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The message of the Cheka-OGPU and the authenticity of the transcript cannot be verified at this time. The channel itself cast doubt on the fact of the bird collision, saying in a post dated December 26 that damage visible in images of the jet’s wreckage after its crash “indicates that a missile launched by an air defense system likely exploded near the aircraft.” .
One of the surviving passengers told the Russian state-run RT channel that they tried to land in Grozny three times, and on the third approach, “something exploded…”.
“I wouldn’t say it was inside the plane,” he said, adding that debris flew between his legs and pierced his life jacket.
The pilots took the plane away from Grozny, the probable transcript indicated that they were asking the control tower about the weather in Mineralnye Vody and Makhachkala – two relatively close cities. But the plane eventually crossed the Caspian Sea to the east and crashed near Aktau at 11:28 a.m. local time, about an hour after the first reports that a drone attack on Grozny had been repulsed.
The video, which shows the plane descending and then hitting the ground, shows that it was intact and not on fire until it fell. Pictures and video of the plane’s tail show numerous holes, tears and dents that observers say look like shrapnel damage. The edges of the holes are bent inward, indicating that the explosion occurred outside the plane, not inside the cabin.
Military analyst Yan Matveev told the Nastoyastchee vremya channel that the damage could have been caused by the explosion of the Russian Pantsir S-1 missile at some distance from the fuselage.
In addition, footage from inside the plane before the crash shows extensive damage.
According to The Wall Street Journal, British aviation security company Osprey Flight Solutions said in a warning to airlines that the plane “was likely shot down by a Russian military air defense system.”
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“Video of the wreckage and circumstances surrounding the airspace security environment in southwestern Russia indicate that the aircraft was hit by some sort of anti-aircraft fire,” Osprey chief intelligence officer Matt Bory was quoted as saying by the WSJ.
The head of the Center for countering disinformation of the State Emergency Service of Ukraine Andriy Kovalenko said the day before that the plane “was shot down by a Russian anti-aircraft system.”
The authorities of Kazakhstan, Russia and Azerbaijan do not comment on the causes of the plane crash, the head of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov, limited himself to expressing his condolences. Putin’s spokesman Dmytro Peskov said that the Kremlin will not put forward a hypothesis of the causes of the Azerbaijan Arilines plane crash until the end of the investigation.
A passenger plane of Azerbaijan Airlines crashed on the morning of December 25 near the city of Aktau. There were 62 passengers and five crew members in the plane, 38 people died.