By Maria Gordeyeva
ASTANA (Reuters) – An Embraer airliner flying from Azerbaijan to Russia crashed near the town of Aktau in Kazakhstan on Wednesday with 62 passengers and five crew members on board, Kazakh authorities said. claiming that 27 people had survived.
Unverified video of the crash shows the plane, which was operated by Azerbaijan Airlines, catching fire when it hit the ground and thick black smoke rising afterward. Bloody and bruised passengers could be seen tripping over a piece of the fuselage that remained intact.
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The Central Asian country’s Emergency Situations Ministry said in a statement that firefighters put out the fire and survivors, including three children, were being treated at a nearby hospital.
Azeri Airlines said the Embraer 190 plane, with flight number J2-8243, was flying from Baku to Grozny, the capital of Russian Chechnya, but was forced to make an emergency landing about 3 km away ( 1.8 miles) from the Kazakh city of Aktau.
Russian news agencies said the plane was diverted due to fog in Grozny.
Authorities in Kazakhstan said they had started looking into different possible versions of what happened, including a technical problem, Russia’s Interfax news agency reported.
Russia’s aviation watchdog said in a statement that preliminary information suggested the pilot decided to make an emergency landing after a bird strike.
After the accident, Ilham Aliyev, the president of Azerbaijan, was returning from Russia where he was to attend a summit on Wednesday, the Russian news agency RIA reported.
Ramzan Kadyrov, the Kremlin-backed Chechen leader, expressed his condolences in a statement and said those being treated at the hospital were in extremely serious condition and that he and others would pray for their speedy recovery.
(Reporting by Mariya Gordeyeva and Tamara Vaal in Astana, Nailia Bagirova and Moscow bureau; writing by Andrew Osborn; editing by Emelia Sithole-Matarise)
