RUSSIAN President Vladimir Putin apologised to his Azerbaijani counterpart Ilham Aliyev at the weekend for what he called a “tragic incident” following the crash of an Azerbaijani airliner in Kazakhstan that killed 38 people — but he stopped short of acknowledging that Moscow was responsible.

There are mounting allegations that the plane was shot down by Russian air defences attempting to deflect a Ukrainian drone strike near Grozny, the capital of the Russian republic of Chechnya.

A Kremlin statement said on Saturday that air defence systems were firing near Grozny airport as the airliner “repeatedly” attempted to land there on Wednesday. It did not explicitly say that one of them had hit the plane.

According to the statement, Mr Putin apologised to Mr Aliyev “for the fact that the tragic incident occurred in Russian airspace.”

The readout said that Russia had launched a criminal probe into the incident and Azerbaijani state prosecutors had arrived in Grozny to participate.

The Kremlin also said that “relevant services” from Russia, Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan were jointly investigating the crash site near the city of Aktau in Kazakhstan.

The plane was flying from the Azerbaijani capital Baku to Grozny when it turned towards Kazakhstan, hundreds of miles across the Caspian Sea from its intended destination, and crashed while attempting to land. There were 29 survivors.

According to a readout of the call provided by Mr Aliyev’s press office, the Azerbaijani president told Mr Putin that the plane was subject to “external physical and technical interference,” although he also stopped short of blaming Russian air defences.

Mr Aliyev noted that the plane had multiple holes in its fuselage and that the occupants had sustained injuries “due to foreign particles penetrating the cabin mid-flight.”

He said that a team of international experts had begun probing the incident at Azerbaijan’s initiative, but he provided no details.

Earlier this week, the Azerbaijani prosecutor-general’s office confirmed that investigators from Azerbaijan were working in Grozny.

On Friday, a US official and an Azerbaijani minister made separate statements blaming the crash on an external weapon, echoing aviation experts who blamed the crash on Russian air defence systems responding to a Ukrainian attack.

Crash survivors told Azerbaijani media that they had heard loud noises as the aircraft was circling over Grozny.