The founder of the mercenary group Wagner, Yevgeny Prigozhin, has been confirmed dead.
Prigozhin (62) died in a plane crash last week, two months after he mounted a mutiny against Russia’s military that President Vladimir Putin decried as “treason”.
In a statement on Sunday, the spokesperson of the country’s Investigative Committee, Svetlana Petrenko, said that forensic testing identified all 10 bodies recovered at the site of Wednesday’s plane crash. She said:
Molecular genetic testing has been completed… According to its results, the identities of all 10 deceased have been established, and they correspond to the list published in the flight manifest.
The statement, however, did not offer any details as to what might have caused the crash.
The Russian president sent his condolences on Thursday to the families of those who died in the crash. He said:
He [Prigozhin] was a talented person, a talented businessman, he worked not only in our country, and achieved results, but also abroad, particularly in Africa.
10 people were on board the private jet which crashed in the Tver region northwest of Moscow on Wednesday.
They included Prigozhin and Dmitry Utkin, his right-hand man who helped found the Wagner group.
The others on the Embraer Legacy plane – flying from Moscow to St Petersburg – included Wagner members Valery Chekalov, Sergei Propustin, Yevgeny Makaryan, Alexander Totmin and Nikolay Matuseyev.
The plane was flown by pilot Alexei Levshin and co-pilot Rustam Karimov, and there was one flight attendant, Kristina Raspopova.
More: Pindula News