A giant plane ‘linked to Wagner’ has crashed in Mali just a month after the mutinous mercenary group’s leader met a similar fate a month ago.
The Soviet-designed Ilyushin Il-76 burst into flames Saturday morning near Gao International Airport, Malijet reported.
A witness told the local news website: ‘A white plane missed its landing around 10am and crashed near the airport. Shortly, it caught fire.’
Photographs from the crash site show thick black smoke billowing from the military transport plane which reportedly crashed after the fuel tank malfunctioned.
The craft was ‘damaged beyond repair’, the Aviation Safety Network said, as firefighters worked to battle the blaze.
Malian journalist Serge Daniel said on X, formerly known as Twitter, that the plane had been transporting equipment and a number of people were on board.
The number of people on board injured or killed in the crash, however, remains unclear.
A patchwork of reports and sources have suggested that Wagner was behind the controls of the plane, said to have been registered ‘TZ98’.
Sharing a photograph of the crash, Russian military-linked Telegram channel VChK-OGPU said: ‘According to preliminary data, there could be mercenaries from PMC Wagner on board.’
Though Grey Zone, a Telegram account associated with Wagner, shrugged off the reports as ‘rumours’.
‘This chartered Il-76 aircraft was used by local forces to transport cargo for various purposes,’ it said in a post yesterday.
‘There were no Wagner Group personnel on board.’
The downed plane may have been operated by Ruby Star Airways, a Belarusian cargo airline, the Dambiev pro-war Telegram channel claimed.
The paramilitary force Wagner is deeply rooted in the West African nation of Mali, fighting alongside the military against armed militants since at least 2021, analysts say.
Wagner has long acted as a ‘proxy force’ for Russia’s Ministry of Defence, according to the US, tucking itself into Libya, Syria and countries in sub-Saharan Africa.
Yevgeny Prigozhin, the group’s renegade leader and once a key ally of Russian president Vladimir Putin, died in a fiery plane crash last month.
After staging a dramatic yet short-lived mutiny in June, Prigozhin was said to be among 10 people who died when a private plane crashed outside Moscow on August 23.
His death was confirmed after investigators said that genetic testing showed the victims of the crash matched the names of the plane’s passenger manifest.
Unconfirmed footage shared by Russian news agency RIA Novosti claimed to show the plane, an Embraer Legacy 600 business jet, plunging from the sky.
It ended weeks of uncertainty over Prigozhin’s whereabouts, where a condition of the abruptly brokered deal by Belarus to stop his coup included him leaving Russia for the Eastern European country.
Except he didn’t. Photographs, videos and whispers place Prigozhin in Belarus, Russia and in areas of Africa over the next two months.
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