Forty-Two people are likely dead after a passenger plane has crashed in Kazakhstan after being rerouted due to fog, the country’s emergencies ministry said.
The Azerbaijan Airlines flight was flying from Baku in Azerbaijan to Grozny in Russia but crashed near Aktau airport in the west of Kazakhstan.
The plane had 67 passengers and five crew on board, Kazakh authorities announced, saying 12 people had survived.
Video footage shared online appeared to show a plane burst into a fire ball as it tried to land before a large cloud of black smoke quickly appeared.
Bloodied and bruised passengers could be seen stumbling from a piece of the fuselage that had remained intact.
The Central Asian country’s emergencies ministry said in a statement that fire services had put out the blaze and that survivors, including three children, were being treated at a nearby hospital.
Azerbaijan Airlines said the Embraer 190 aircraft, with flight number J2-8243, had been flying from Baku to Grozny, the capital of Russia’s Chechnya, but had been forced to make an emergency landing approximately 3 km (1.8 miles) from the Kazakh city of Aktau.
Russian news agencies said the plane had been rerouted due to fog in Grozny.
Authorities in Kazakhstan said they had begun looking into different possible versions of what had 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 had decided to make an emergency landing after a bird strike.
Following the crash, Ilham Aliyev, the president of Azerbaijan, was returning home from Russia where he had been due to attend a summit on Wednesday, Russia’s RIA news agency reported.
Ramzan Kadyrov, the Kremlin-backed leader of Chechnya, expressed his condolences in a statement and said those being treated in hospital were in an extremely serious condition and that he and others would pray for their rapid recovery.