Azerbaijan Airlines Crash Survivor Recalls Moment Realized He Was Alive: ‘I Thought That Was My Last Prayer’

Survivors from the Azerbaijan Airlines flight that went down in Kazakhstan, a country in central Asia, are speaking out for the first time since the Christmas Day tragedy.

In a new interview with the New York Times published Friday, Dec. 27, two flight attendants — Zulfugar Asadov and Aydan Rahimli — and passenger Subhonkul Rakhimov spoke with the outlet following the deadly Dec. 25 crash. 

Azerbaijan Airlines Flight 8243 had been en route to Grozny, Russia, from the Azerbaijani capital of Baku with 67 people on board when it went down. Twenty-nine individuals survived.

“Thank God I’m alive,” Asadov told the Times in a phone interview from his hospital bed in Baku. 

“I thought that was my last prayer,” Rakhimov said, recalling how he began to pray after hearing a loud noise and observing damage to the airplane’s fuselage.

Rakhimov, whose seat was in the back of the aircraft, continued describing the chaotic event, saying his body was hit. He also mentioned lots of twisting before hearing nothing but others moaning. “I realized that we have landed,” he said. “I didn’t know what to do — whether to laugh or cry.”

By the time Rahimli woke up, she had already been transported from the wreckage: “I opened my eyes and saw workers. I asked where I was, and they said that we were in Aktau.”

Flight attendant Asadov’s daughter, Konul, shared how she learned her father had survived a fatal plane crash. 

“He told me, ‘Don’t worry, your father is alive, but the plane he was on crashed,’ ” she said of receiving a phone call from her husband urging her to come home from work.

Konul had seen videos of the crash online, and was shocked that her father survived. 

“When I heard his voice,” she said, “I thought I was being deceived, that he couldn’t have survived something like that, that someone was faking his voice to comfort me.”

She added that she usually checks in with her father before each flight, but because the weather was clear for his route that day, she did not. 

“I call him every time before the flight if the weather is bad, and after the flight I call my mom and ask if she talked to him,” Asadov’s daughter said.

According to the Times, a passenger recalled hearing a loud bang, then seeing flight attendant Asadov get hit in the arm with an object that pierced his skin, though it was unclear what the object was or where it came from.

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Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Russian officials have launched an investigation into the crash, however Azerbaijan Airlines said the preliminary results showed the plane had suffered “physical and technical external interference.”

In a statement from the airlines translated by the Times, the company said Friday regular flights to eight Russian cities had been suspended. Flights to Makhachkala in neighboring Dagestan were also grounded.