Azernews.Az

BAKU – Remains of the crew members of the Azerbaijani cargo plane that crashed in Afghanistan were delivered to Baku on Monday evening, nearly three weeks after the accident, a member of the commission investigating the crash has said.

"The remains have been turned in for a medical expertise, and the expertise has begun," Adil Gasymov said.

Shakir Musayev, an Azerbaijani health ministry official in charge of forensic expertise, said six types of expertise will be carried out to identify the remains and ascertain the causes of death. The expertise will take about a month, he added.

The bodies of the crash victims were found in a large-scale operation carried out by Afghanistan’s interior ministry, representative of Azerbaijan’s embassy in Pakistan and Afghanistan Chingiz Garibli announced last week. The operation came after Baku’s numerous appeals and notes issued to the Afghan government.

All nine crew members on board - five citizens of Azerbaijan and four Uzbek nationals - were killed after the IL-76 plane carrying cargo to the international coalition forces in Afghanistan crashed in the Parwan province, north of Kabul, on July 6. The plane was carrying 18 tons of cargo from the Azerbaijani capital Baku to the city of Bagram, which is located around 45 km north of the Afghan capital and is home to the largest US air base in the country.

The Taliban reportedly claimed responsibility for the incident.

Members of the commission investigating the crash had long been unable to reach the crash site due to the operations being waged there against the Taliban.

An official of the Afghan transport ministry earlier claimed it was meaningless to visit the region where the plane crashed, saying everything had turned into ashes during the explosion and fire on board, except the "black box", which was submitted to the ministry by US servicemen.

However, it remains unclear whether or not the "black box" that was found belonged to the Azerbaijani plane. Ilham Amirov, vice-president of Azerbaijan’s state airline AzAL, who co-chairs the commission investigating the crash, said that scripts on the "black box" shown on the photos made at the site were illegible. He said that only after they are deciphered will it be possible to conclude if the "black box" was derived from the Azerbaijani plane.

The IL-76 plane of the privately owned Silk Way Airlines was manufactured in Russia in 2005.