An Azerbaijani passenger plane that crashed in December after being diverted from Russia to Kazakhstan was hit by a Russian Pantsir-S air defence system, an Azerbaijani government source told Reuters on Tuesday, The Caspian Post reports.

Thirty-eight people were killed when the Azerbaijan Airlines passenger plane crashed on Dec. 25 near the city of Aktau in Kazakhstan after re-routing across the Caspian Sea from southern Russia.

"The Azerbaijani side possesses a fragment of a Pantsir-S missile which was extracted from the aircraft and identified through international expertise," the source said.