By MIRIAM KUEPPER and WILL STEWART

This is the horrific moment a passenger plane with 72 people on board hit the ground in a fireball in a Christmas Day crash landing in Kazakhstan.

There were 67 passengers and five crew members on board the Azerbaijan airlines flight from Azerbaijan’s capital Baku to the Russian city of Grozny.

Footage of the crash showed the plane bursting into flames as it hit the ground and thick black smoke then rising. Bloodied and bruised passengers could be seen stumbling from a piece of the fuselage that had remained intact.

The plane was in flames and broke into several parts on landing in Aktau, in western Kazakhstan. The country’s emergency situations ministry said its personnel were putting out a fire at the site.

‘At the moment, 14 survivors have been taken to the regional hospital, including five in intensive care,’ the health ministry’s regional department said in a statement.

The ministry later said that 28 people survived the crash, seven of which are in serious condition. At least 22 survivors are being treated in hospital and two of those are children, according to the ministry.

At least 10 people were confirmed as dead after the Embraer 190 crash, reported as being thrown out of the cabin. More than 40 people are feared to have died.

Azerbaijan Airlines, the country’s flag carrier, said the Embraer 190 had ‘made an emergency landing’ around three kilometres from Aktau, an oil and gas hub on the eastern shore of the Caspian Sea.

‘A plane doing the Baku-Grozny route crashed near the city of Aktau. It belongs to Azerbaijan Airlines,’ the Kazakh ministry said on Telegram.

© Daily Mail

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