Azerbaijan pays tribute to pilots and passengers who perished in air crash

By Nailia Bagirova

BAKU (Reuters) - Azerbaijan on Sunday paid tribute to the pilots and passengers of the Azerbaijan Airlines passenger plane that crashed in Kazakhstan killing 38 people after Russian air defences were used against Ukrainian drones.

Flight J2-8243 crashed on Wednesday in a ball of fire near the city of Aktau in Kazakhstan after diverting from southern Russia where Ukrainian drones were attacking several cities.

Captain Igor Kshnyakin and co-pilot Alexander Kalyaninov, both ethnic Russians with Azerbaijan citizenship, and Hokuma Aliyeva, a flight attendant, were given full honours at a ceremony at the Alley of Honour in central Baku attended by President Ilham Aliyev and his wife, Mehriban.

The pilots have been lauded in Azerbaijan for landing in a way which allowed 29 people to survive but led to their own deaths.

Azerbaijan's presidential office said that after the yet-to-be explained incident over Russian airspace, the pilots battled to control the plane - desperately trying to find a landing spot.

With holes in the fuselage, some crew injured, passengers praying for their lives in a de-pressurised cabin and the plane spiralling out of control, the pilots flew across the Caspian Sea towards their death in an crash landing.

"Only through the courage and professionalism of the pilots was an emergency landing successfully carried out," Azerbaijan's presidential office said.

The Alley of Honour is Azerbaijan's most sacred modern burial ground - where prominent politicians, poets and scientists are laid to rest, including Heydar Aliyev, the late father of the current president.

Captain Kshnyakin's daughter, Anastasia Kshnyakina, said her father was a dedicated pilot who took his responsibilities to his passengers extremely seriously.

"My father always said: when I take off, I am responsible not only for my life, but also for the lives of all passengers and crew members," Kshnyakina said.

"With his last flight, he proved what a true hero should be."

Russia's Vladimir Putin on Saturday apologised to Azerbaijan's president for a "tragic incident" in Russian airspace involving the plane which Baku said crashed after some sort of external interference.

Four sources with knowledge of the preliminary findings of Azerbaijan's investigation into the disaster told Reuters on Thursday that Russian air defences had mistakenly shot it down.

The extremely rare publicised apology from Putin was the closest Moscow has come to accepting some blame for Wednesday's disaster, although the Kremlin statement did not say Russia had shot down the plane, only noting that a criminal case had been opened.

The Embraer passenger jet had flown from Azerbaijan's capital Baku to Grozny, in Russia's southern Chechnya region, before veering off hundreds of miles across the Caspian Sea.

(Reporting by Nailia Bagirova in Baky; Writing by Guy Faulconbridge; Editing by Sharon Singleton)