The owner of the Wagner Group, Yevgeny Prigozhin, is officially dead. “The genetic tests have been completed,” the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation has announced, “and based on their results the identities of the 10 deceased have been established: they correspond to the list on the flight sheet.” The head of the mercenary company died on Wednesday when the plane in which he was traveling from Moscow to St. Petersburg crashed in the Tver region. In the event, which occurred just two months after Prigozhin’s mutiny against the Kremlin, the main members of Wagner’s leadership also died.
Also traveling in the device were the commander whose nickname gave its name to the Wagner Group, the former member of the intelligence services of the Russian army (GRU) Dmitri Utkin, and the businessman Valeri Chekalov, considered responsible for the logistics of the mercenary company.
The death of Wagner’s populist chief has sparked an outpouring of consternation among his supporters, who have placed numerous memorial offerings in various cities across the country in his memory. Company mercenaries, usually masked, have laid candles and flowers before the portraits of Prigozhin and Utkin.
unknowns about the funeral
It is currently unknown when the businessman’s funeral will take place. The remains of the deceased were taken to a Tver morgue awaiting their genetic identification in a Moscow laboratory. Prigozhin, a native of Saint Petersburg, could be buried in the city that saw the birth of his emporium with the betting and gambling businesses. catering, and where he met the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, “in the early nineties”, according to the president’s own words. At that time the Russian leader was deputy mayor of the city, where he worked as a casino supervisor.
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Other options for his funeral are Bakínskaya, in southern Krasnodar, where Wagner’s largest cemetery is located, and the Mytishchi cemetery, built a decade ago on the outskirts of Moscow by the government to give eternal rest to senior officials and other citizens. featured. Distinguished by the Kremlin with the Hero of the Russian Federation award, Prigozhin has the right to be buried in its Pantheon of Defenders of the Fatherland. Unless the Kremlin denied him honors at the last minute for his riot on June 23 and 24, his funeral would also include the firing of several salutes and other formal acts.
The Wagner founder’s device, an Embraer Legacy 600, crashed minutes after taking off on the outskirts of the town of Kuzhenkino, fifty kilometers from Vladimir Putin’s residence. In the last 32 recorded seconds of the flight, the aircraft suddenly began to rise and fall erratically before falling out of control.
The official Kremlin investigation does not rule out any hypothesis, from pilot errors to technical problems “and external influences”, according to a source in the Russian newspaper. RBK, while Western intelligence services do not rule out an assassination ordered by the Kremlin. The Pentagon considers that it could have been an explosive device introduced into the plane and excludes the version of the impact of an anti-aircraft missile.
Putin’s spokesman, Dmitri Peskov, said on Friday that the accusations against the Kremlin of Prigozhin’s death are “an absolute lie.”
In addition to the presence of Wagner’s leadership and several bodyguards, there were two pilots and a flight attendant on the plane. All three were employees of the MNT Aero company, which had allegedly offered its services to Prigozhin on other occasions. According to Putin, the businessman had just returned from Africa on the same day as the event.
the russian newspaper Moskovsky Komsomolets has revealed that the device had been repaired weeks before its fatal flight in a workshop at the Moscow Sheremetyevo airport. According to the newspaper’s sources, a part of its engines was damaged and its repair was delayed due to the difficulties in importing another, due to the sanctions. Only the technical director of MNT Aero and two engineers had access.
However, hours before the air disaster, two unknown people also visited the plane at the invitation of the co-pilot who would die in the event, Rustam Karimov. according to the newspaper Moskovsky Komsomoletsintroduced themselves as potential buyers of the device from the RusJet company and looked at it for about an hour.
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