The United States on Wednesday said that it has seen “early indications” that the Azerbaijan Airlines plane that crashed on December 25 may have been downed by the Russian air defence. The proclamation was made by the White House’s national security advisor John Kirby on Friday. While hinting at the Russian involvement, Kirby declined to comment further on the matter.
According to The Washington Post, Kirby maintained that the indications that the United States assessed went beyond just looking at widely circulated photographs of the damaged plane. Meanwhile, Ukraine’s Presidential spokesperson Andriy Yermak said that Russia must be held responsible for the whole ordeal.
The proclamation from Kirby came after Azerbaijan Airlines said on Friday that a preliminary inquiry had blamed both “physical and technical external interference”, without going into details. However, several aviation experts and others in Azerbaijan believed that the aircraft’s GPS was affected by electronic jamming and was then damaged by shrapnel from Russian air defence missile blasts, BBC reported.
Azerbaijan says plane hit by ’external interference’ over Russia
Amid brewing speculations, Azerbaijan’s transport minister said that the plane was subjected to “external interference” and was damaged inside out as it tried to land in Russia’s southern republic of Chechnya. “All [the survivors] without exception stated they heard three blast sounds when the aircraft was above Grozny,” said Transport Minister Rashad Nabiyev.
The place was diverted across the Caspian Sea to Kazakhstan, where it crashed with the loss of 38 lives. The transport minister maintained that the investigators would now examine “what kind of weapon, or rather what kind of rocket was used” for the crash. It is pertinent to note that the Azerbaijani government has so far avoided directly accusing Russia, possibly to avoid animosities with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Content retrieved from: https://www.firstpost.com/world/now-us-says-russia-may-have-downed-azerbaijani-plane-as-moscow-remarks-carpet-plan-was-in-place-13848137.html.
