Photos from Azerbaijan jet crash suggest a missile strike, according to experts

The crash of an Azerbaijan Airlines passenger jet over Kazakhstan on Wednesday that killed 38 people aboard was likely caused by an antiaircraft missile, some aviation experts say, although an investigation is still ongoing.

The Embraer 190 with 67 passengers and crew was flying from the Azerbaijani capital of Baku to Grozny in Chechnya, Russia, when it was diverted. Russia’s civil aviation authority, Rosaviatsia, suggested on Friday that the plane was rerouted due to thick fog and Ukrainian drone activity over Chechnya. According to publicly available flight-tracking data, the jet’s GPS tracking was also jammed.

Azerbaijan Airlines issued a statement saying the crash was the result of “physical and technical external interference.”

The plane crashed in a ball of flames a few miles from an airport in the city of Aktau in western Kazakhstan. Of those aboard, 29 survived the crash.

John Cox, a former pilot and aviation expert, tells NPR’s Morning Edition that the erratic flight path taken by the jet before crashing appears to indicate that crew members were “fighting for control of the airplane and had limited control.” That, along with photos of the aircraft that showed puncture holes in the plane’s tail section, “point to the possibility of an explosion potentially of an antiaircraft missile near the aircraft,” Cox says.

Russia has denied shooting down the plane and Russian officials initially blamed a bird strike for the crash. But Cox says “the evidence so far is inconsistent” with that explanation.

“One … you don’t hear the crew say that. Two, a bird strike doesn’t cause the kind of damage that we’re seeing on this aircraft,” he tells Morning Edition.

In a video statement carried by Russia’s state news agency TASS, the head of Rosaviatsia, Dmitry Yadrov, said: “The situation around Grozny airport at the time was very difficult, with Ukrainian combat drones attacking civilian infrastructure in Grozny and Vladikavkaz.”

Azerbaijan Airlines has since suspended flights to Russia, The Moscow Times said, citing local reports.

Meanwhile, Azerbaijan’s minister of digital development and transportation, Rashad Nabiyev, said that “preliminary conclusions by experts point at external impact,” according to The Associated Press. “The type of weapon used in the impact will be determined during the probe,” he said.

At a press briefing on Friday, White House National Security spokesman John Kirby was asked by a reporter whether the U.S. had any intelligence indicating the plane had been shot down. “Short answer to your question is yes. And I’ll leave it at that,” Kirby replied.

Mark Zee of OPSGroup, which does aviation risk assessment, was quoted by the AP as saying that analysis of the images of the crashed plane indicates it was “almost certainly” hit by a surface-to-air missile, also known as a SAM. “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 told the AP.

Cox says the crash is reminiscent of the 2014 shoot-down of a Malaysian Air Boeing 777 that killed all 298 passengers and crew aboard. The flight, MH17, was en route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur when it crashed over the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine. The Kremlin blamed Ukraine for shooting down the plane, but an independent international investigation named a Buk surface-to-air missile — supplied by Russia to Moscow-backed rebels in the region — as the likely cause. The majority of those killed aboard MH17 were from the Netherlands and in 2022, a Dutch court found guilty of murder three men who it said had operated the missile battery.

In 2023, the Joint Investigation Team said there were “strong indications” that Russian President Vladimir Putin personally approved the transfer of the missiles to Ukrainian separatists who shot down MH17.