An inversion formula was developed by Bukhgeim and Kazantsev for attenuated fan-beam projections [Russian Academy of Science Siberian Branch: The Sobolev Institute of Mathematics (2002)]. The inversion formula was obtained by relating the attenuated fan-beam projections to unattenuated fan-beam projections and by trickily processing the unattenuated fan-beam projections. We show in this paper that the inversion formula can be readily obtained from Novikov's inversion formula for the two-dimensional (2D) attenuated radon transform. The derivation provides an alternative proof of Bukhgeim and Kazantsev's inversion formula by the use of transformation between parallel-beam coordinates and fan-beam coordinates and thus is quite elementary.