STORY::: Mourners honor two pilots and a flight attendant
who died in the Azerbaijan Airlines crash
:: Baku, Azerbaijan
:: December 29, 2024
Captain Igor Kshnyakin and co-pilot Alexander Kalyaninov, both ethnic Russians with Azerbaijan citizenship, and Hokuma Aliyeva, a flight attendant, were buried in Baku.
Earlier on Sunday, they were given full honors at a commemorative event at the Alley of Honor in central Baku, attended by Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev and his wife Mehriban.
The pilots are being praised in Azerbaijan for landing in a way that allowed 29 people to survive but led to their own deaths.
The Embraer EMBR3.SA passenger plane had flown from the Azerbaijani capital Baku to Grozny, in Russia's southern Chechnya region, before departing hundreds of kilometers across the Caspian Sea.
The Alley of Honor is Azerbaijan's most sacred modern cemetery, where prominent politicians, poets and scientists are buried.
