The president of Azerbaijan, Ilham Aliyev, this Sunday demanded that Russia finish assuming its responsibility, in whole or in part, for the accident this week of the Azerbaijan Airlines Embraer 190 plane after ensuring that the device lost control while flying over the Russian region of Grozny and which received fire from the ground when the Russian air defense was repelling a Ukrainian air attack in the area.
Aliyev made these statements a day after having a telephone conversation with Vladimir Putin in which the Russian president apologized after admitting that the incident began in Russian airspace – the plane ended up crashing in Kazakhstan three kilometers from the airport of the Kazakh city of Aktau, leaving 38 dead and 29 injured, most of them seriousness – although he did not fully assume responsibility for what happened.
“The Russian side must confess its guilt and must punish the guilty”
«The facts are the following: that an Azerbaijani civilian plane was shot at from abroad when flying over Russian territory, near the city of Grozny; “that it almost lost control then and that it ended up losing it due to electronic warfare systems, and that, at the same time, its tail was seriously damaged by shots from the ground,” he said in statements reported by the official Azerbaijani news agency Azertag.
The president has reiterated that his country has presented three fundamental demands. First, some apologies from Russia “that were presented” in Saturday’s conversation. Secondly and thirdly, he warned, “the Russian side must confess its guilt and must punish the guilty, hold them criminally responsible and pay compensation to the State of Azerbaijan and the injured passengers and crew.”
Despite his demands, the president is confident that the plane was not shot down intentionally.
«I hope our other conditions are accepted. All these conditions are fair. “There is no extraordinary demand or problem here and it is based on international experience and normal human behavior,” said the president, who expressed his confidence that “the plane was not shot down intentionally.”
Aliyev has also criticized the initial reactions of the Russian Government to the plane crash, which occurred on Christmas Day. “For the first three days we heard nothing but nonsense versions from Russia“, he lamented before remembering that “the fuselage was full of holes, so the initial theory that it collided with a flock of birds was completely ruled out but, despite everything, some Russian official circles decided to promote this hypothesis outright. forms.
“One of the things that saddened and surprised us was that official Russian organizations presented versions related to the explosion of a gas cylinder, making it very clear that they wanted to cover up the matter,” the president denounced.
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