By Burc Eruygur
ISTANBUL (AA) - A plane carrying Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin crashed in Russia’s Tver region on Wednesday killing all 10 people on board.
Two months ago, Prigozhin launched a mutiny against Russian President Vladimir Putin but called it off and settled in neighboring Belarus.
Initial media reports late on Wednesday said Prigozhin was among the passengers of an Embraer-135 plane flying from the Russian capital Moscow to St. Petersburg.
Some pro-Wagner Telegram channels also reported that Wagner co-founder Dmitry Utkin, a former lieutenant colonel in Russia’s military intelligence agency GRU, was also among those who boarded the plane.
Russia’s Federal Air Transport Agency announced in a statement that a special commission has begun investigating the incident.
It reported that there were seven passengers and three crew members on board the aircraft.
A later statement with the names of those on board confirmed Prigozhin and Utkin were on the flight.
The five other passengers included: Valery Chekalov, Yevgeny Makaryan, Sergey Propustin, Aleksandr Totmin and Nikolay Matuseev.
According to the Dossier Center, a Russian investigative group, Chekalov was a deputy of the Wagner chief, working with him since the 2000s.
Chekalov oversaw all of Prigozhin's "civilian" projects abroad, including geological exploration, oil production and agriculture, as well as the Wagner’s logistics.
Chekalov was also included on a sanctions list released by the US State Department on July 20.
Makaryan joined Wagner in March 2016 and was part of the fourth Wagner assault detachment in Syria, which came under fire from American aircraft near the town of Khsham in January 2017, Dossier said.
Propustin joined Wagner in March 2015 and fought in the company of Kirill Tikhonovich, who the report said is one of the combat units of the Wagner Group.
No details on Totmin and Matuseev’s background or position within the Wagner Group were found.