Putin on Prigozhin accident: caused internally not by the missile
Fragments of hand grenades were found in the bodies of the plane that exploded on August 23, which killed Wagner chief Yegveny Progozhin and nine other people.
Thus Russian President Vladimir Putin at a meeting of the state think tank Club Valdai in Sochi, a city on the Black Sea. On the occasion he proposed a new theory on the causes of the crash of the private jet on which Prigozhin was travelling. According to the Kremlin leader's version, the occupants of the plane would have consumed alcohol or drugs and the accident would have been caused by the explosion of a grenade inside the aircraft.
Putin said: "Fragments of hand grenades were found in the bodies of people who died in the plane crash. There was no impact with the exterior of the plane, that's a certain fact." The Russian president gave no further explanation as to how one or more grenades could have exploded on board, but added that he believed it was a mistake not to have carried out tests to detect the presence of alcohol or drugs in the bodies of the passengers on the plane, given the large quantities of cocaine that Russian police say they found at Wagner's headquarters in St. Petersburg.
The private plane departing from Moscow and heading to St. Petersburg on which Prigozhin was traveling with nine other people, six passengers and three crew members, crashed on Wednesday 23 August not far from the city of Tver, about 150 kilometers from the Russian capital. The crash of the plane occurred about two months after the Wagner group uprising, when Prigozhin had started a march towards Moscow. After his death, Putin described Prigozhin, 62, as "a man with a difficult fate" who had "made serious mistakes in life".
