BAKU: Azerbaijan said on Monday that Moscow had promised to punish those responsible for the downing of an Azerbaijan Airlines plane that Baku says was shot at by Russian air defences. The AZAL Embraer 190 jet crash-landed in Kazakhstan on December 25, killing 38 of the 67 people on board.
Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev has demanded that Moscow accept responsibility for mistakenly shooting the plane as it tried to make a scheduled landing at Grozny airport in south Russia. Russia has not confirmed that one of its air-defence missiles hit the plane, though President Vladimir Putin told Aliyev in a phone call over the weekend that the systems were active at the time and that he was sorry the incident took place in Russian airspace.
Azerbaijan's General Prosecutor said in a statement on Monday that the head of Russia's Investigative Committee had told Baku: "Intensive measures are being carried out to identify the guilty people and bring them to criminal responsibility." Russia has opened a criminal inquiry into the incident but has not said whether it agrees that the plane was hit by one of its air-defence missiles, and has not said anything about finding or bringing any perpetrators to justice. Aliyev had issued a rare forthright condemnation of Moscow -- a close partner of Baku -- on Sunday. He said the plane was "hit by accident" but was angry that Russia had apparently tried to hide the cause of the crash.
Demanding that Putin admit responsibility, Aliyev also accused Russia of putting forward alternative theories that "clearly showed the Russian side wanted to cover up the issue". Russia said Grozny, in the southern Russian region of Chechnya, was being attacked by Ukrainian drones when the plane approached to make its landing through thick fog. Survivors have described hearing explosions outside the plane, which then diverted more than 400 kilometres across the Caspian Sea towards the Kazakh city of Aktau, where it crash-landed.
Putin said Russian air defence was operating in Grozny on December 25 when the plane tried to land, before diverting and crashing in western Kazakhstan. The Kremlin statement gave no indication that Putin had said Russia was at fault. Later on Saturday, the Russian leader called for a "transparent" probe into the crash. Aliyev's office said that he had "emphasised" during the call that the plane had been subject to outside interference over Russia. Russian news agencies reported that Putin and Aliyev discussed the crash again on Sunday.
The United States this week said that it had "early indications" that Russia was responsible for the crash but did not provide details. The European Union on Saturday called for a "swift" and "independent" probe into the crash. The International Air Transport Association on Sunday called for a "thorough, transparent and impartial" probe. "We must find out why this catastrophe happened and take action to ensure there is never a repeat," it said in a statement. "Civil aircraft must never be the intended or accidental target of military operations."
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