By people comments it seems that rockets loaded with fragmentation warheads leave the same traces that can be seen in the photos of the tail of the plane, high velocity impacts, a damage very similar to what happened with MH17 flight as someone commented below.
The problem with the approaches probably was due the GPS was suffering spoofing[1], so the same way the avionics was receiving wrong data, can be guessed everyone was receiving wrong data, their "mistake" attack could have come from there, in addition, they did not close the air space to the civil planes, for unknown reasons. They will never admit exactly how they screwed it up, using what happened with MH17 as reference.
But an important matter here also is, even by diverting the plane with a declared emergency to cross the Caspian Sea, the pilots managed to arrive to the coast[3], and the GPS jamming across TWO-THIRDS of the Caspian Sea[2][1] what would have prevented finding survivors and fuselage evidences, had no effect. Now it can be investigated.
[3] Fighting to control and keep the plane flying, as the 3D image in the flightradar24 article[1] shows, rendered from the ADS-B data at moment the GPS jamming stopped. One can see at first glance how hard it was for them to cross the sea. The investigations and the black box will tell better what happened before.
The problem with the approaches probably was due the GPS was suffering spoofing[1], so the same way the avionics was receiving wrong data, can be guessed everyone was receiving wrong data, their "mistake" attack could have come from there, in addition, they did not close the air space to the civil planes, for unknown reasons. They will never admit exactly how they screwed it up, using what happened with MH17 as reference.
But an important matter here also is, even by diverting the plane with a declared emergency to cross the Caspian Sea, the pilots managed to arrive to the coast[3], and the GPS jamming across TWO-THIRDS of the Caspian Sea[2][1] what would have prevented finding survivors and fuselage evidences, had no effect. Now it can be investigated.
[1] https://www.flightradar24.com/blog/azerbaijan-airlines-e190-...
[2] https://www.flightradar24.com/data/aircraft/4k-az65#3879c26d
[3] Fighting to control and keep the plane flying, as the 3D image in the flightradar24 article[1] shows, rendered from the ADS-B data at moment the GPS jamming stopped. One can see at first glance how hard it was for them to cross the sea. The investigations and the black box will tell better what happened before.