An Azerbaijani airliner with 67 people on board crashed Wednesday near the Kazakhstani city of Aktau, killing 38 people and leaving 29 survivors, a Kazakh official said.

Deputy Prime Minister Kanat Bozumbaev disclosed the figures while meeting with Azerbaijani officials, the Russian news agency Interfax reported.

The Embraer 190 was en route from the Azerbaijani capital of Baku to the Russian city of Grozny in the North Caucasus when it was diverted and attempted an emergency landing 1.8 miles from Aktau, Azerbaijan Airlines said.

Speaking at a news conference, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev said that it was too soon to speculate on the reasons behind the crash, but said that the weather had forced the plane to change course.

“The information provided to me is that the plane changed its course between Baku and Grozny due to worsening weather conditions and headed to Aktau airport, where it crashed upon landing,” he said.

Russia’s civil aviation authority, Rosaviatsia, said that preliminary information showed that the pilots diverted to Aktau after a bird strike led to an emergency on board.

Kazakhstan’s Emergency Situations Ministry said it had opened an investigation into the causes of the crash. Later Wednesday, Azerbaijan’s Prosecutor General’s Office said in a statement that it had opened a criminal investigation and dispatched a team of investigators to the scene. Similar criminal investigations were also opened in Russia and Kazakhstan.

According to Kazakh officials, those aboard the plane included 42 Azerbaijani citizens, 16 Russian nationals, six Kazakhs and three Kyrgyzstan nationals. Azerbaijan’s prosecutor general’s office previously said that 32 of the 67 people on board had survived the crash, but told journalists that the number wasn’t final. The Associated Press could not immediately reconcile the difference between the numbers of survivors given by Kazakhstan and Azerbaijani officials.

Mobile phone footage circulating online appeared to show the aircraft making a steep descent before smashing into the ground in a fireball.

An unverified video from the scene, released by RIA Novosti, a Russian state news agency, showed injured people being pulled from the wreckage. In the video, some passengers were lying on the ground, while others were able to walk away from the plane.

Flight-tracking data from FlightRadar24.com showed the aircraft making what appeared to be a figure eight once nearing the airport in Aktau, its altitude moving up and down substantially over the last minutes of the flight before striking the ground.

FlightRadar24 separately said in an online post that the aircraft had faced “strong GPS jamming” and “spoofing” which “made the aircraft transmit bad ADS-B data,” referring to the information that allows flight-tracking websites to follow planes in flight. Russia has been blamed in the past for jamming GPS transmissions in the wider region.

Radar jamming is often used to defend an area against drones. It was not immediately clear whether that played any role in the crash.

According to Andrei Menshenin, an aviation journalist, GPS jamming and spoofing could make piloting uncomfortable but was unlikely to have caused the crash.

“Every day hundreds of planes fly though areas where GPS spoofing is happening,” he said in response to written questions.

On Wednesday, local news outlets in Chechnya reported drone strikes against the republic. Grozny Inform, a state-run news website in Chechnya, cited Khamzat Kadyrov, a local security official, as stating that all of the drones had been shot down. The reports could not be independently verified. Ukrainian drones have hit various targets in Chechnya in recent weeks, including a site belonging to a riot police battalion.

Azerbaijan Airlines said it would keep members of the public updated and changed its social media banners to solid black. It also said that it would suspend flights between Baku and Grozny, as well as between Baku and the city of Makhachkala in Russia’s North Caucasus, until its investigation into the crash has been concluded.

Azerbaijan’s state news agency, Azertac, said that an official delegation of Azerbaijan’s emergency situations minister, the deputy general prosecutor and the vice president of Azerbaijan Airlines were sent to Aktau to conduct an “on-site investigation.”

Aliyev, who was traveling to Russia, returned to Azerbaijan on hearing news of the crash, the president’s press service said. He was due to attend an informal meeting of leaders of the Commonwealth of Independent States, a bloc of former Soviet countries founded after the collapse of the Soviet Union, in St. Petersburg.

Aliyev expressed his condolences to the families of the victims in a statement on social media.

He also signed a decree declaring Dec. 26 a day of mourning in Azerbaijan.

Russian President Vladimir Putin spoke to Aliyev on the phone and expressed his condolences, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters.

Speaking at the CIS meeting in St. Petersburg, Putin also said that Russia’s Emergency Ministry sent a plane with equipment and medical workers to Kazakhstan to assist with the aftermath of the crash.

The New York Times contributed.