The president of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin, revealed this Thursday that fragments of hand grenades were found in the bodies of the victims of the plane crash in which Yevgeny Prigozhin was traveling.
Putin also guarantees, in statements cited by Agence France-Presse, that the plane crash was not caused by any external impact.
“The head of the investigation committee reported a few days ago that fragments of hand grenades had been found in the bodies of the victims of the air disaster. There was no external impact on the plane,” he said at a conference.
The crash of the plane in which he was following Yevgeny Prigozhin occurred in August and killed the leader of the Wagner group a few weeks after he advanced towards Moscow, accompanied by his group of mercenaries.
The private plane carrying Prigozhin and his guard crashed late in the afternoon of August 23 in the Tver region, northwest of Moscow, immediately raising suspicions of an assassination orchestrated by Russian power.
Russia’s civil aviation authority said then that Prigozhin, 62, and some of his top lieutenants were on the list of passengers and crew aboard the plane.
Prigozhin’s deputy, Dmitry Utkin, as well as the Wagner group’s logistics mentor, Valery Chekalov, were also killed in the accident.
In Washington, Paris, Berlin or kyiv, senior officials suggested that their suspicions fell squarely on the Kremlin.
A preliminary assessment by US intelligence services concluded that an intentional explosion caused the plane to crash, and one of the Western officials who described this initial assessment recalled Putin’s “long history of trying to silence his critics.”
For its part, the Kremlin denied having ordered Prigozhin’s murder, calling these insinuations “speculation” and “a complete lie.”
Yevgeny Prigozhin was the founder and head of the Wagner mercenary force, which organized a day-long mutiny against the Russian army, leading his mercenaries from Ukraine towards Moscow. President Vladimir Putin called the act “treason” and promised punishment for those involved.
However, the Kremlin ended up reaching an agreement with Prigozhin to end the armed revolt, allowing him to be released without facing charges and resettle in Belarus.
Source: TSF
