The death of Yevgueni Prigozhin and the leadership of the Wagner Group when their plane crashed in Russia on Wednesday was a murder. This was stated on Thursday by US official sources consulted by the Wall Street Journal (WSJ).
The unidentified sources They assured that the plane was not shot down with a surface-to-air missile, but rather it could have been a bomb that exploded inside the Embraer plane where the seven Wagner executives and three crew members were traveling, or it could be “some other form of sabotage.”
The same source, apparently, later spoke to CBS and offered exactly the same hypotheses.
The WSJ cites another British official source that is even more forceful in its accusations, stating that the most likely suspicion was an assassination commissioned or carried out by the Russian internal intelligence service FSB.
In addition to the press versions, the Pentagon also spoke on Thursday about the death of Wagner’s founder and stated that, according to its first evaluation, the leader of the paramilitary group died on board the plane.
(Also read: Prigozhin and other strange deaths of Putin critics: the death list)
Defense Department spokesman Brigadier General Pat Ryder told a news conference that the US is continuing to examine what happened.but ruled out that the accident occurred due to an attack by a surface-to-air missile.
Asked by reporters whether the Pentagon believes that Prigozhin could have been “deliberately assassinated,” Ryder simply replied that he was not going to share intelligence.
The Embraer private plane carrying the head of the Wagner Group, Yevgueni Prigozhin, crashed on Wednesday afternoon in central Russia, accident in which its ten occupants died.
As reported by the civil aviation agency, Rosaviatsia, seven passengers were traveling on the Embraer-135, including Prigozhin and his “right hand”, Dmitri Utkin, a former Russian military intelligence (GRU) officer.
(You can read: Who were the other passengers on the plane in which Wagner’s leader was traveling?)
The air disaster occurred in the central Tver region when the plane that had taken off from Moscow was heading to St. Petersburg.
At the moment, the causes of the event are unknown, although some media and Telegram channels have considered various versions, from a bomb attack ordered by the Kremlin to a Russian anti-aircraft defense missile or an attack by enemy drones.
(You may be interested in: The doubts left by the death of Yevgueni Prigozhin, Wagner leader and Putin’s archenemy)
There is not much that happens in Russia that Putin is not behind
This Wednesday, as soon as it was known that Prigozhin’s plane had crashed, the US president, Joe Biden said that the news did not surprise him, and although he assured that he did not have specific information, he pointed to the Russian president: “There’s not much going on in Russia that Putin isn’t behind, but I don’t have enough information to know the answer.”
but this thursday Russian President Vladimir Putin promised that all causes of the plane crash would be investigated in which Prigozhin was traveling.
In his first words after officially announcing the death of his once close ally, Putin sent ambivalent messages on Thursday about Prigozhin and Wagner: “I would like to emphasize that these people made a notable contribution to the common cause of the fight against the neo-Nazi regime in Ukraine We remember it, we know it and we will not forget it.”
(Also: Videos of the fatal plane crash that killed militia chief Wagner)
But then he added: “(Prigozhin) was a person with a complicated fate. He made serious mistakes during his life, but he achieved the necessary results for himself and, when I asked him, for the common cause, as in recent months”, he stated.
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*With EFE
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