Government sources told Euronews that the plane had requested an emergency landing at several Russian airports but was reportedly denied permission, forcing the pilots to continue toward Aktau.

A day after an Azerbaijani airliner’s crashed in Kazakhstan, aviation experts say the plane most likely went down after being hit by Russian air defense systems.

As authorities in several countries tried to determine what caused the deadly crash of a passenger airplane in Kazakhstan, investigators and experts Thursday were focusing on the possibility that a Russian air defense system had struck the plane.