The pilots' account has subsequently been disputed as the location of the crash on the slopes of Kozhuh hill near the village of Rupite, Petrich Municipality, only a few kilometers (miles) away from the border with Greece, suggests that the El Al flight had been followed without being shot at until its very last minutes over Bulgarian territory.

"[3]: 315  The airliner was hit by the MiG-15's guns and then descended, breaking apart at 2,000 feet (610 m), and crashed in flames north of the town of Petrich, Bulgaria, near the Yugoslav and Greek borders killing the 7 crew and 51 passengers.

One possibility is that, using NDB navigation, thunderstorm activity in the area[5] might have upset the navigational equipment so that the crew believed they were over the Skopje radio beacon and turned to an outbound course of 142 degrees but this version is not supported by any factual evidence of thunderstorms in the area and is disputed by both the Bulgarian military and current historiographers of Bulgarian aviation.

[3] It is firmly established only that the El Al flight, flying at FL180 (an altitude of approximately 18,000 feet (5,500 m) above mean sea level), strayed off the Amber 10 airway over Yugoslav airspace into Bulgarian territory.

As noted in Kibble,[6] when the surviving mail arrived into Tel Aviv, it was stamped with a Hebrew instructional marking prior to being forwarded on to its final town destination within Israel.

The boxed violet instructional marking reads (translated from the Hebrew):[6]This piece of mail survived in El-Al airplane that was shot down over Bulgaria on 27.7.55.

The Bulgarian Communist government saw the accident as eroding the détente in East/West relations that had been achieved in talks in Geneva earlier the same year.