A lab run by Brazil's air force has sent data from the flight recorders recovered from the Brazilian-made Azerbaijan Airlines plane that crashed last month to the Kazakhstan authority investigating the crash.
The lab said in a statement on January 6 that it had completed the extraction of the data from the cockpit recorders of the Embraer plane and turned the material over to the investigators.
Kazakh authorities announced on December 29 that the recorders were being sent to Brazil amid accusations by Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev that Russia was trying to "cover up" the cause of the tragedy.
The Azerbaijan Airlines passenger plane was flying from the Azerbaijani capital, Baku, to Grozny in Russia's Chechnya region on December 25 when it was diverted and crashed in Kazakhstan, killing 38 of the 67 people on board.
The Kazakh Transport Ministry said the commission in charge of the probe had sent the flight recorders to the Center for the Investigation and Prevention of Aeronautical Accidents in Brazil amid evidence that the jet was hit by a Russian air-defense missile before it went down near Aqtau in western Kazakhstan.
Aliyev said on December 29 that the plane was mistakenly shot at while approaching Grozny. He also said Russia had not admitted guilt or apologized to Azerbaijan but instead had presented “absurd theories" about a bird strike or an explosion of a gas cylinder on the plane.
Those theories, Aliyev said, showed "that the Russian side wanted to cover up the issue."
The Kremlin said Russian President Vladimir Putin apologized to Aliyev but did not accept blame for the plane crash.
In a phone call with Aliyev on December 28, Putin said Russian air defenses were repelling an alleged Ukrainian drone attack on Grozny when the plane was trying to land at the airport there, a Kremlin statement said.
Russia's Investigative Committee has opened a criminal investigation into the possible violation of flight safety rules, the statement said.