A business jet en route from Moscow to St Petersburg crashed Wednesday, killing all ten people on board, Russian emergency officials said.
The jet reportedly belonged to Yevgeny 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 when it went down.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.