Russia officially confirmed this Sunday the death of Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of the Russian paramilitary group Wagner, whose plane crashed on Wednesday, amid growing doubts about the cause of the crash.
The Investigation Committee of Russia (CIR) confirmed that it had identified the Prigozhin’s corpse and of the other nine deceased in the accident by comparative DNA analysis.
“In the investigation of the plane crash in the Tver region, genetic-molecular expertise was concluded. Based on its results, the identity of the ten deceased has been established, which corresponds to those declared in the passenger list,” the committee said in a statement.
Wagner Group: how was the incident
The private plane carrying Prigozhin and his close aides crashed on Wednesday in the Tver region, northwest of Moscow. In addition to Prigozhin, the list included his right-hand man, Dmitri Utkin, head of operations for the paramilitary group, whose existence was barely recognized by the Kremlin at the end of 2022.
The accident occurred exactly two months after Wagner will star in a mutiny against the military leadership Moscow, which unleashed a wave of speculation about the origin of the incident.
Western governments and opponents of Russian President Vladimir Putin hinted that the Kremlin could be behind the event.
The Kremlin, however, denied those accusations and the Russian president on Thursday promised a “thorough” investigation into the case. At the moment, the Russian investigators did not mention any hypothesis about the causes of the accident.
Meanwhile, since the plane crash, makeshift altars to Prigozhin have been erected in various cities across the country, from Novosibirsk in Siberia to St. Petersburg in the northwest of the country.
The small memorials illustrate Prigozhin’s popularity in those areas, where Wagner had training centers.
Source: Ambito
