The Azerbaijani passenger plane that crashed on Christmas Day killing 38 people suffered external damage and was riddled with holes in its fuselage, a preliminary report revealed.

Azerbaijan Airlines flight J2-8243, which had been flying from Baku to Grozny, the capital of Russia’s republic of Chechnya, crash-landed a few kilometres short of Aktau airport in Kazakhstan on 25 December 2024.

The Embraer 190 aircraft was carrying 67 people but only 29 survived, making it the first fatal accident involving a passenger jet in 2024.

A preliminary report published on a Kazakh government website on Tuesday said that there was damage to the plane, including on its stabilisers, hydraulics and trim systems, but it did not say what caused the damage, Reuters reported.

The report was issued under global aviation rules to learn from incidents like these in order to prevent them in the future, rather than assigning blame for the crash.

Also included were photographs showing that the port side of the tail section had numerous punctures, while other pictures showed fragments that it described as “foreign metal objects” removed from the left stabiliser and hydraulic system.

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A senior Azerbaijani government official told Reuters that the external impact referred to in the report was from a Russian surface-to-air missile. The news agency had not received comment from Russian officials on this.

"The Azerbaijani side possesses a fragment of a Pantsir-S missile, which was extracted from the aircraft and identified through international expertise," the source said.

Four sources with knowledge of Azerbaijan’s preliminary investigations previously told Reuters in December that the investigations found Russian air defences were responsible for the crash.

One of the Azerbaijani sources told the news agency that preliminary results indicated that the plane had been struck by a Russian Pantsir-S air defence system.

“No one claims that it was done on purpose. However, taking into account the established facts, Baku expects the Russian side to confess to the shooting down of the Azerbaijani aircraft,” the source said.

Russia has started its own investigation into the crash and said that actions are being taken to try to understand the circumstances around the incident.

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Russia’s aviation watchdog’s preliminary investigation indicated the pilot decided to change landing site after “a collision with birds”.

Russian President Vladimir Putin apologised to his Azerbaijani counterpart over the plane crash in Russian airspace in December.

“Vladimir Putin apologised for the tragic incident that occurred in Russian airspace and once again expressed his deep and sincere condolences to the families of the victims and wished a speedy recovery to the injured,” an official Kremlin statement said.

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