The 53-page preliminary report published by Kazakhstan's transport ministry included photographs of the plane.

An Azerbaijani passenger plane that crashed in December after being diverted from Russia to Kazakhstan had suffered external damage and was riddled with holes in its fuselage, according to a report published on a Kazakh government website on Tuesday.

On December 25, an Azerbaijan Airlines passenger plane crashed in Kazakhstan, killing more than half of the 67 people on board. The flight had been diverted to Aktau in the country’s west for an emergency landing after a failed attempt to land in Grozny,

An Azerbaijani passenger plane that crashed in December after being diverted from Russia to Kazakhstan had suffered external damage and was riddled with holes in its fuselage, according to a report published on a Kazakh government website.

An Azerbaijani passenger plane that crashed in December after being diverted from Russia to Kazakhstan was hit by a Russian Pantsir-S air defence system, an Azerbaijani government source told Reuters on Tuesday.

Russian civil aviation authorities said Wednesday that they have not been granted access to the “foreign objects” that damaged an Azerbaijani jet before it crashed in Kazakhstan last month. Kazakhstan’s Transportation Ministry on Tuesday published preliminary findings of its investigation into the crash of Azerbaijan Airlines Flight 8243.

An Azerbaijani passenger aircraft that crashed last December was hit by a Russian Pantsir-S air defense system, according to Tuesday report by Reuters. The plane had been diverted from Russia to Kazakhstan before the incident occurred.