Wagner boss Yevgeny Prigozhin reportedly killed in plane crash en route from Moscow
Russian authorities say Prigozhin was one of ten passengers listed for the flight, although it is not yet clear whether he was on board at the time.
A business jet en route from Moscow to St Petersburg crashed Wednesday, killing all ten people on board, Russian emergency officials said.
Unconfirmed media reports said the jet belonged to Prigozhin, founder of the Wagner private military company.
Russia’s civilian aviation regulator, Rosaviatsia, confirmed that Prigozhin was on the passenger list. However, it was not immediately clear if he had boarded the flight.
Russia’s state news agency Tass cited emergency officials as saying that the plane carried three pilots and seven passengers. The authorities said they were investigating the crash, which occurred in the Tver region more than 100 kilometres north of Moscow.
Flight tracking data shows a private jet registered to Wagner that Prigozhin had used previously took off from Moscow on Wednesday evening and its transponder signal disappeared minutes later.
The signal was lost in a rural region where there are no nearby airfields where the jet could have landed safely.
Video shared widely on social media channels, including by a senior advisor to the Ukrainian government, appears to show a plane fall from the sky, and then burst into flames on the ground.
The authenticity of those videos could not be immediately verified.
Prigozhin, whose private military force Wagner fought alongside Russia’s regular army in Ukraine, mounted a short-lived armed mutiny against Russia’s military leadership in late June.
The Kremlin said he would be exiled to Belarus, and his fighters would either retire, follow him there, or join the Russian military.
This week, Prigozhin posted his first recruitment video since the mutiny, saying that Wagner is conducting reconnaissance and search activities, and “making Russia even greater on all continents, and Africa even more free.”