“It wasn’t a flash, it was a metallic pop,” says Vitaly, leaning against a window near the crash site of the plane carrying Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of Wagner’s paramilitary police. The ship with ten passengers on board crashed in Kuzhenkino, Russia, about 300 km northwest of Moscow. All passengers are dead, including the powerful leader of the private army. In videos taken by locals, we see a small business jet circling in a clear sky surrounded by white smoke.
“I heard an explosion or a bang,” says another resident, Vitaliy Stepenok. “Usually, when an explosion occurs on the ground, there is an echo, but there was just an explosion, I looked up and saw white smoke. The man also claims that the aircraft was damaged before the fall, as also evidenced by amateur pictures broadcast on Telegram: “The plane hovered down with only one wing. He did not dive, but hovered.
Then this 70-year-old man got on his bike and rode to the crash site, about twenty minutes away: “Everything was on fire. People were walking around, removing the remains of the passenger.”
The Wagner militia confirmed the death of Yevgeny Prigozhin, as well as the Federal Air Transport Agency. The French government, through its spokesman Olivier Veran, expressed “reasonable doubts” about the “conditions” of the plane crash in an interview with France 2 television. “Not much happens in Russia without Putin. US President Joe Biden.
All the bodies of the passengers were taken to the morgue. The investigation into the “violation of air transport safety rules” was entrusted to a specialist in air crashes, Ivan Sibul. He has already participated in the investigation of the 2014 disaster at Vnukovo airport, in which the head of Total, Christophe de Margerie, died.
Source: Le Parisien
I am Jack Morton and I work in 24 News Recorder. I mostly cover world news and I have also authored 24 news recorder. I find this work highly interesting and it allows me to keep up with current events happening around the world.
