An engineer who carried out last-minute repairs on the doomed flight reportedly boarded by Yevgeny Prigozhin is being questioned by authorities.
The outspoken head of the mutinous private mercenary group Wagner is thought to have died aged 62 Wednesday after a plane departing Moscow’s Sheremetyevo to St Peterbugh at about 6pm crashed.
It went down 100 miles to the northwest near the city of Tver. An unverified video posted by state-owned news agency RIA Novosti purports to show the plane plummeting as smoke spews out.
Prigozhin’s name was on a list of passengers aboard the Embraer Legacy 600, a plane widely reported as belonging to the former war tycoon.