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.

Kazakh officials released the report February 4, stating the 53-parge document “does not purport to assign blame or responsibility to anyone” for the incident, in which an Azerbaijani flight bound for Grozny in Chechnya is widely believed to have been hit by anti-aircraft fire before making a crash landing near the Kazakh city of Aktau,

BAKU (Reuters) - 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.