Moscow received no samples from Russia-bound flight crash site – aviation source to RT

Multiple “foreign objects” were found inside the Azerbaijan Airlines plane that crashed late last year, yet Russia has still received none of them

Moscow has not received any of the “foreign objects” recovered from the wreckage of the Azerbaijan Airlines Flight 8243 that crashed in Kazakhstan late last year, a source within Russia’s civil aviation industry close to the investigation of the incident has told RT.

The Russia-bound flight crashed in Kazakhstan on December 25 after sustaining damage mid-air in the skies above the city of Grozny in the Chechen Republic. On Tuesday, a preliminary report of the incident was released by the Kazakh authorities, who provided new details and shared imagery of the “foreign objects” recovered from the crash site. The investigators abstained from speculating on the nature of the mangled pieces of metal that had been recovered, stating only they had been sent for examination.

The release of the report prompted speculation in some Western media that the “foreign objects” were consistent with premade shrapnel used in missiles deployed by the Russian-made Pantsir-S anti-aircraft system. Reuters reported that Azerbaijan was in possession of a piece of such a missile that had supposedly been recovered from the wreck.

“The Azerbaijani side possesses a fragment of a Pantsir-S missile, which was extracted from the aircraft and identified through international expertise,” a senior Azerbaijani government official told the agency.

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