A film crew from Azerbaijan has visited Kazakhstan to make a documentary about the deadly crash of an Azerbaijan Airlines plane that Azerbaijan says was hit by Russian ground fire.
Lada.kz, a media organization based in the city of Aktau in western Kazakhstan, talked to the three-member team from the CBC Azerbaijan TV channel about the project. The filmmakers went to Aktau because the plane crashed on the approach to the city’s airport on December 25 last year after diverting across the Caspian Sea from its planned landing in Grozny, Chechnya.
“Several films have already been made in Azerbaijan on this topic, but in our project we want to reconstruct the chronology of events in detail, literally minute by minute,” senior editor Gulzar Mustafayeva told Lada.
“It is very important to show how the people of Kazakhstan reacted, how the residents of Aktau united and came to the rescue,” she said, referring to emergency response teams that rushed to help survivors as well as the donation of blood from people in Kazakhstan.
The crash killed 38 of the 67 people on board and soured relations between Russia and Azerbaijan, which accused Russian officials of failing to take responsibility. Russian President Vladimir Putin apologized to Azerbaijani leader Ilham Aliyev, but did not acknowledge that Russian fire damaged the plane. Russia has said the area was under attack by Ukrainian drones at the time.
Kazakhstan issued a preliminary report on the crash in February. It said the plane had been hit by metal objects, an assertion that appeared to confirm that the aircraft was shot at from the ground. But the report didn’t say Russia was to blame.
Mustafayeva and her colleagues visited the crash site, where a simple memorial has been installed.
“Despite the fact that everything was cleaned, tidied up, and the main fragments were taken away long ago, small details still remain on the site – scraps of clothing, remnants of shoes, a wheel from a suitcase in which someone was carrying their things,” she told Lada. “This makes a very strong impression. You stand and understand: human lives were cut short here.”
She said CBC Azerbaijan TV plans to show the documentary later this year.
