This Wednesday the 25th, a company plane Azerbaijan Airlines (AZAL) that covered the Baku-Grozny route crashed three kilometers from the airport in the Kazakh city of Aktau. From the beginning there were reports of 38 deaths, as well as dozens of injuries.
Apparently, it was one more of the unfortunate accidents of aviation about which the media reports from time to time. And they are – let’s say it incidentally – much rarer than one would expect, if we take into account that there are more than one hundred thousand commercial flights that take place every day on our planet.
But within a few hours, elements began to appear that cast doubt on the thesis of a simple accident. Andryi Kovalenko, head of the Center for Combating Disinformation at the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine, stated that the Azeri aircraft was shot down “by a Russian air defense system.”
It is to some extent understandable that objections to this approach were immediately raised. This took into account that, during the last three years, the spokesperson’s country has been a victim of the brutal aggression unleashed by the Russian dictator Putin (“special military operation” is the euphemism in Putin’s Newspeak that the Cuban Television repeats gladly).
But photos of parts of a fuselage that – it is claimed – belong to the crashed airplane immediately began to circulate on the networks. In them you can see holes that seem to have been caused by shrapnel. Added to this is what was expressed to the agency EFE by “two sources from the Azerbaijani Government under conditions of anonymity”: that the plane “was hit by a Russian anti-aircraft projectile.” The same thing, according to NBC, is also stated by “an American official.”
The Kremlin was quick to attempt damage control. The spokesman for the Presidency of Russia, Dmitri Peskov, declared at a press conference that the cause of the disaster was being investigated. “It would be wrong to make any hypothesis before the research reaches conclusions,” he said, concluding: “We definitely can’t do it and no one should.”
Of course Mr. Peskov and his bosses would know from the first moment what really happened—if the speculations were true. Who better than them to know! But it is clear that they are trying to “get healthy.” They trust in the passage of time, so that, when the truth finally makes its way, and the terrible effects of crash have been forgotten, at least in part.
In the meantime, the Russian spokesperson considered it appropriate to expand on the topic of the condolences expressed by his boss to the victims of the catastrophe. This is how a consummate genocidaire, the dictator Putin, expressed his condolences to the loved ones of the deceased, as well as his wishes for the recovery of those injured during the crash.
But while Russia now tries to buy time and leaves all possibilities open, the mass media of Castro-Communism appear to be “more papist than the Pope.” Their feathers and parrots insist, tirelessly, on the same ridiculous versions that were launched at the beginning to try to give the incident an “explanation” that is as least adverse as possible to the Russian regime.
So, for example, the newspaper Granmain a note in its “Direct Thread” section, alludes to the condolences expressed by the formal head of the regime, Miguel Díaz-Canel, to the governments of the affected countries, the families of the deceased and the injured. And it ends by stating that the device “fell at the airport in Aktau, Kazakhstan, after stumbling upon a flock of birds.”
For its part, in the midday broadcast of Cuban Television News This Thursday, the parrot on duty opened the diapason a little: “So far, several possible causes of the air disaster are being analyzed, among them, the collision of the aircraft with a flock of birds (as reported yesterday) or the explosion of an oxygen cylinder on board the plane”. He also mentioned the missile hypothesis, but as a secondary thesis originating in Ukraine.
It is clear that the definitive version will be provided by the investigative commission of Kazakhstan, the country where the impact occurred. Specialists from the Central Asian country have at their disposal not only the remains of the damaged device, but also, as has been announced, its two “black boxes”. Let us hope that this investigation has the “exhaustive” nature that NATO has just claimed.
Meanwhile, this chronicler deplores that the pilot did not have the presence of mind of Captain Chesley Sullenberger, the “Sully” of Clint Eastwood’s formidable film (re-exhibited days ago in the Cuban Television), based on a real event. As will be remembered, in that case the aviator saved the lives of all his passengers by landing in the Hudson River.
Perhaps in the case of the Azeri plane the personal misfortunes would have been less if its pilot had chosen to ditch in the nearby Caspian? It is a speculationbut I admit that I am leaning towards an affirmative answer. However, I also recognize that predicting the past is one of the easiest tasks in this world…
In any case, what the AZAL pilot did or did not do represents a detail, a mere incidence in the misfortune that occurred. If the Russian missile thesis is proven, the dictator Putin will have a new crime on his hands to answer for.
