The Kremlin has urged restraint in attributing causes to Wednesday’s Azerbaijan Airlines Embraer 190 crash, which killed 38 of the 67 people on board near the Kazakh city of Aktau.
An aviation expert suggested a Russian anti-missile battery may have brought down the passenger plane, but the Kremlin warned against jumping to conclusions.
En route from Baku (Azerbaijan) to Grozny (Chechnya), the flight attempted an emergency landing about 1.8 miles from Aktau before crashing, igniting a fire and splitting into two.
President Vladimir Putin’s spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said the investigation into the cause of the crash was underway.
“It would be incorrect to make any hypotheses before the investigation comes to conclusions, and we definitely cannot do it and no one should do it,” he said in his daily news conference.
Kanat Bozumbayev, the Kazakh deputy prime minister, also cautioned against assigning a cause while the investigation is in its preliminary stage.
"The police and the prosecutor's office are conducting forensic examinations," Bozumbayev told Kazakh media on Thursday, adding, "Therefore, at this point, it is premature to talk about anything. This is pure hype."