ASTANA: An Azerbaijan Airlines passenger jet crashed on Wednesday in western Kazakhstan, killing 38 of the 67 people on board, officials said.
The Embraer 190 aircraft that was supposed to fly northwest from the Azerbaijani capital Baku to the city of Grozny in Chechnya in southern Russia instead flew across the Caspian Sea and went down near the city of Aktau in Kazakhstan.
The plane’s course on Flight Radar showed it flying away from its normal route and then circling over the area where it eventually crashed near Aktau, which is an oil and gas hub on the eastern shore of the Caspian Sea.
“The situation is not very good, 38 dead,” Russia’s Interfax news agency quoted Kazakh Deputy Prime Minister Kanat Bozumbayev as saying.
Azerbaijan Airlines reported that 67 people were on board — 62 passengers and five crew members.
The Kazakh emergency situations ministry reported earlier in the day that “28 survivors including two children have been hospitalized.”
The Kazakh transport ministry said the plane was carrying 37 nationals from Azerbaijan, six from Kazakhstan, three from Kyrgyzstan and 16 from Russia.
“A plane doing the Baku-Grozny route crashed near the city of Aktau. It belongs to Azerbaijan Airlines,” the Kazakh transport ministry said on Telegram.
Azerbaijan Airlines, the country’s flag carrier, said the plane “made an emergency landing” around three kilometers (1.9 miles) from Aktau.
Kazakhstan said it had opened an investigation.
Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev declared Thursday a day of national mourning and canceled a planned visit to Russia for an informal summit of leaders of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), a grouping of former Soviet nations.
“We cannot disclose any investigation results at this time,” the office of Azerbaijan’s prosecutor general said in a statement.
“All possible scenarios are being examined, and the necessary expert analyzes are underway,” it added.
It said an investigative team led by the deputy prosecutor general of Azerbaijan has been dispatched to Kazakhstan and is working at the crash site.
The Kazakh emergency situations ministry said its staff put out a fire which broke out when the plane crashed.
It said 150 emergency workers were at the scene.
The health ministry said a special flight was being sent from the Kazakh capital Astana with specialist doctors to treat the injured.
Aliyev’s office said the president “ordered the prompt initiation of urgent measures to investigate the causes of the disaster.”
“I extend my condolences to the families of those who lost their lives in the crash... and wish a speedy recovery to the injured,” Aliyev said in a social media post.
Russian President Vladimir Putin held a phone conversation with Aliyev and also “expressed his condolences in connection with the crash,” his spokesman Dmitry Peskov told a news conference.
A Russian emergency situations ministry had been sent to Aktau with medical personnel and other equipment, Putin said later as he opened the CIS leaders’ meeting in Saint Petersburg.
Azerbaijan’s first lady Mehriban Aliyeva, who is also the country’s first vice president, said she was “deeply saddened by the news of the tragic loss of lives in the plane crash near Aktau.”
“I extend my heartfelt condolences to the families and loved ones of the victims. Wishing them strength and patience! I also wish a speedy recovery to the injured,” she said on Instagram.
Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov said on Telegram: “I express my condolences to the relatives of the passengers of the Azerbaijan Airlines jet who died.”
38 dead as Azerbaijani jet crashes in Kazakhstan
https://arab.news/c542x
38 dead as Azerbaijani jet crashes in Kazakhstan
- The plane’s course on Flight Radar showed it flying away from its normal route and then circling over the area where it eventually crashed near Aktau
- Azerbaijan Airlines reported that 67 people were on board — 62 passengers and five crew members
Only 4% women on ballot as Bangladesh prepares for post-Hasina vote
- Women PMs have ruled Bangladesh for over half of its independent history
- For 2026 vote, only 20 out of 51 political parties nominated female candidates
DHAKA: As Bangladesh prepares for the first election since the ouster of its long-serving ex-prime minister Sheikh Hasina, only 4 percent of the registered candidates are women, as more than half of the political parties did not field female candidates.
The vote on Feb. 12 will bring in new leadership after an 18-month rule of the caretaker administration that took control following the student-led uprising that ended 15 years in power of Hasina’s Awami League party.
Nearly 128 million Bangladeshis will head to the polls, but while more than 62 million of them are women, the percentage of female candidates in the race is incomparably lower, despite last year’s consensus reached by political parties to have at least 5 percent women on their lists.
According to the Election Commission, among 1,981 candidates only 81 are women, in a country that in its 54 years of independence had for 32 years been led by women prime ministers — Hasina and her late rival Khaleda Zia.
According to Dr. Rasheda Rawnak Khan from the Department of Anthropology at Dhaka University, women’s political participation was neither reflected by the rule of Hasina nor Zia.
“Bangladesh has had women rulers, not women’s rule,” Khan told Arab News. “The structure of party politics in Bangladesh is deeply patriarchal.”
Only 20 out of 51 political parties nominated female candidates for the 2026 vote. Percentage-wise, the Bangladesh Socialist Party was leading with nine women, or 34 percent of its candidates.
The election’s main contender, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, whose former leader Zia in 1991 became the second woman prime minister of a predominantly Muslim nation — after Pakistan’s Benazir Bhutto — was the party that last year put forward the 5 percent quota for women.
For the upcoming vote, however, it ended up nominating only 10 women, or 3.5 percent of its 288 candidates.
The second-largest party, Jamaat-e-Islami, has not nominated a single woman.
The 4 percent participation is lower than in the previous election in 2024, when it was slightly above 5 percent, but there was no decreasing trend. In 2019, the rate was 5.9 percent, and 4 percent in 2014.
“We have not seen any independent women’s political movement or institutional activities earlier, from where women could now participate in the election independently,” Khan said.
“Real political participation is different and difficult as well in this patriarchal society, where we need to establish internal party democracy, protection from political violence, ensure direct election, and cultural shifts around female leadership.”
While the 2024 student-led uprising featured a prominent presence of women activists, Election Commission data shows that this has not translated into their political participation, with very few women contesting the upcoming polls.
“In the student movement, women were recruited because they were useful, presentable for rallies and protests both on campus and in the field of political legitimacy. Women were kept at the forefront for exhibiting some sort of ‘inclusive’ images to the media and the people,” Khan said.
“To become a candidate in the general election, one needs to have a powerful mentor, money, muscle power, control over party people, activists, and locals. Within the male-dominated networks, it’s very difficult for women to get all these things.”
