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Dubai: Two days after Vladimir Putin’s chief supporter and political threat Yevgeny Prigozhin fell from the sky, preliminary US intelligence has suggested an intentional explosion caused the fiery plane crash.
World leaders, experts and officials have been quick to point at the Russian president, fuelling suspicion he was the architect of the assassination which fell on the two-month anniversary of Prigozhin’s short-lived armed rebellion against Moscow that bruised Putin’s leadership.
Photos of Yevgeny Prigozhin in various disguises were reportedly found at his properties, according to Russian media.
But nothing happens in Russia without prompting a flurry of conspiracy theories, either by accident or design. The death of the Wagner boss and his top henchman is no different.
While Western officials have suggested it was most likely a bomb that exploded on the aircraft or that some other form of sabotage caused the crash, accurate or reliable information out of Moscow is hard to come by.
There has been no official confirmation that Prigozhin and his offsiders are dead, however Putin referred to him in the past tense in a statement offering condolences.
Russian investigators have launched a probe into the incident, but offered no reason for what caused the plane to plunge to the ground on Wednesday evening (Moscow time).
In the resulting information void, alternative conspiracy theories, and in some cases clear misinformation and disinformation, have flooded mainstream and social media in Russia and abroad.
Baseless theories surrounding the Wagner chieftain’s death have included that the pilot on the plane suffered a heart attack.
The claim appeared in a fake news clipping purporting to be from Russia Today, suggesting the pilot had “post-[COVID] vaccine myocarditis” and that “heart attack may be cause of crash.”
The post, which had more than 36,000 views on X, formerly Twitter, but has been widely debunked, also included oft-touted false claims about mRNA vaccines and COVID-19.
BBC Verify journalist Shayan Sardarizadeh was among disinformation and conspiracy theory experts to describe the post on X as “fake”, saying it had been “shared as a joke”.
Other theories include that it was not Prigozhin himself that was killed in the crash, but rather someone travelling under his name.
Keir Giles, a senior consulting fellow of Chatham House’s Russia and Eurasia Program told British channel TalkTV that people were “right to be cautious” about declaring the Russian warlord was definitely dead, noting his penchant for using aliases.
“We know that Prigozhin had a number of aliases in the form of people who used his name to travel in order that he could obfuscate his movements,” Giles said. “So unless there’s absolute 100 per cent cast iron certainty that this is definitely him, it’s right to carry on saying ‘presumed dead’ as opposed to ‘is definitely gone’.”
Geopolitical strategist Velina Tchakarova, a former director of the Austrian Institute for European and Security Policy, also suggested the crash could be an “intricate ploy”.
Writing on social media, Tchakarova claimed that the fact the Wagner group operated as a state-backed entity rather than a private mercenary group “fuels speculation that Prigozhin’s death might be a fabrication”. She also expressed suspicion about Prigozhin’s recent movements in an out of Africa, as captured in recent video messages from the Wagner boss.
“Given Rosaviatia’s announcement of the plane crash and Russia’s stranglehold over news distribution, this could well be an intricate ploy, possibly to expose internal conspirators against Putin, particularly in the military and security apparatus,” she said.
“Prigozhin’s apparent demise might be a psychological operation, a tactic he’s infamously employed elsewhere.”
While initial eyewitness reports suggested the plane may have been brought down by a surface-to-air missile, the US Department of Defence said on Thursday that there was currently no information to suggest that occurred, Reuters reported.
Other unverified claims being shared on Russian social media have included that a box of wine was loaded onto the plane in Moscow before take-off.
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