Kremlin behind murder of Russian journos in CAR – Ukraine’s Security Service


It is the Russian mercenaries who killed Military reporter Orkhan Dzhemal, film director Alexander Rastorguyev and cameraman Kirill Radchenko in the Central African Republic, Ukraine’s Security Service (SBU) states.

According to their information , Wagner PMC mercenaries were sent to the CAR by top command of Russia’s General Staff of Armed Forces in early 2018. The umbrella structure was M-Finance LLC, a commercial firm affiliated with oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin, who is also known as ‘Putin’s Chef’. In this case, mercenaries were transported to Africa directly on Prigozhin’s private aircraft.

“The covert operations of the Russian mercenaries of Wagner in the CAR should be the subject of an international investigation. The Russian government is in no way interested in establishing the truth, because the talk here is about the ‘private army of Putin’, whose hands are marred by thousands of civilian lives in Ukraine and Syria. We all must finally understand that silence of the global community is killing,” SBU Head Vasyl Hrytsak stressed.

M-Finance LLC Security Service is tasked with training of local paramilitary forces, as well as secret removal of precious stones (diamonds) from the territory of the Central African Republic to Russia, the SBU claims.

Picture by SBU

The Security Service of Ukraine has identified 37 Russian citizens who are engaged by the leadership of Russian military intelligence on a rotational basis to the performance of service tasks in the CAR as members of M-Finance LLC Security Service. Among those, SBU has already identified 10 mercs who were in the Central African Republic on the day the Russian journalists were killed. Most of these persons took part in terrorist activities in the East of Ukraine and in Syria, being awarded for the service with state decorations of the Russian Federation.

“After the Russian special services got intel about the departure of Russian journalists to the Central African Republic, the head of the M-Finance LLC security service Valery Zakharov was given a categorical order to take exhaustive measures to prevent the leakage of information on the presence of Russian terrorists in this African country,” the SBU reports.

On July 31, tragic news about the death of three Russian reporters in the Central African Republic (CAR) appeared. Military reporter Orkhan Dzhemal, film director Alexander Rastorguyev and cameraman Kirill Radchenko visited the country to make a documentary about Russia’s most secretive military gamble, i.e. mercenaries from the so-called Wagner PMC group who had been sent to the CAR, military instructors and a new front in Africa which is being opened by Moscow. The project was carried out by the Journalist Investigation Centre, a new initiative sponsored by Mikhail Khodorkovsky. It aims at exposing the Russian authorities’ dark and dirty campaigns and actions.

They were going from the city of Bangui to the town of Sibut, where they were to have met a local fixer. Earlier, they had failed to get to a mercenary training camp located near the capital. By that moment, they were identified and controlled by government soldiers. To work further, the journalists even paid bribes to the military. They were shot down at one of the savannah posts. For now, it is unknown who fired at them. The Russian authorities say they killed the local illegal armed groups. Meanwhile, many colleagues of journalists believe that the Kremlin is behind the murder.

ІІ, belsat.eu, via ssu.gov.ua

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