Photo courtesy of the Kazakhstan Ministry of Emergency Situations
The black boxes from the Azerbaijan Airlines (AZAL) aircraft that crashed near Aktau have been returned from Brazil to Kazakhstan and handed over to the investigation commission for the crash, according to the Prosecutor General's Office of Kazakhstan, as reported by RIA Novosti.
«In accordance with the Chicago Convention on International Civil Aviation of December 7, 1944, and other international standards, the flight recorders have been received from the Brazilian side and handed over to the commission for analysis,» the statement reads.
Ongoing investigative measures are underway, and international legal assistance requests have been sent to Azerbaijan and Russia, the office added.
The Embraer 190 aircraft crashed on December 25 while operating a flight from Baku to Grozny. Reportedly, it was unable to land in Chechnya's capital due to fog and drone attacks. The aircraft diverted to Kazakhstan's Aktau but crashed three kilometers from the airport. Of the 67 people on board, 38 lost their lives, including citizens of Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and Russia.
Various theories about the crash have been suggested, ranging from bird strikes to external interference. In late December, Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev claimed that Moscow was attempting to downplay the causes of the crash. He asserted that the aircraft had been incapacitated by electronic warfare systems and that the tail section had sustained significant damage from ground fire during the defense against a Ukrainian drone attack in Grozny at the time of landing.
President Aliyev later announced that the black boxes had been sent to Brazil, the country of the aircraft's manufacturer, for decoding instead of the Interstate Aviation Committee (IAC), as proposed by Russia, to avoid potential «conflicts of interest.» This decision was made at the end of December, and by January 7, the decoding process was completed.
Meanwhile, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov remarked that the data retrieved from the black boxes provided «a great deal of interesting information» without elaborating further.
«We must await the full investigation. At this stage, it is unnecessary to fuel speculation in the media using information that has not yet been verified by the black box analysis,» Lavrov stated during a press conference reviewing Russia's diplomatic activities in 2024.
