Was Azerbaijan plane downed by Russia?

The Russian air defences downed an Azerbaijan Airlines plane that crashed in Kazakhstan, killing 38 people, four sources with knowledge of the preliminary findings of Azerbaijan's investigation into the disaster said on Thursday.

Officials did not explain why it had crossed the sea, but the crash occurred after Ukrainian drone strikes this month hit Chechnya. The nearest Russian airport on the plane's flight path was closed on Wednesday morning. One of the sources said preliminary results showed the plane was struck by a Russian Pantsir-S air defence system, and its communications were paralysed by electronic warfare systems on the approach into Grozny.

The source said: "No one claims that it was done on purpose. However, Baku expects the Russian side to confess to the shooting down of the Azerbaijani aircraft."

Three other sources confirmed that the Azeri investigation had come to the same preliminary conclusion.

However, Russia's Defence Ministry did not respond to a request for comment. Kazakhstan's transport prosecutor for the region where the plane came down said its investigation had not yet come to any conclusions about the crash. Kazakh Deputy Prime Minister Qanat Bozymbaev said he could neither confirm nor deny the thesis that Russian air defences downed the plane.

Meanwhile, the Kremlin said that an investigation was ongoing and that it would be improper to comment until the inquiry came to its own conclusions. "It is wrong to build hypotheses before the conclusions of the investigation," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said.