New evidence emerges on the 2018 murders of three Russian journalists in CAR
You might remember from roughly a year ago three Russian journalists and filmmakers were mysteriously murdered in the Central African Republic (CAR). The victims, Orkhan Dzhemal, Alexander Rastorguev and Kirill Radchenko, had traveled to the CAR to make a documentary about the “Wagner Group” a secretive private military contractor affiliated to Yevgeny Prigozhin, nicknamed “Putin’s chef” because of his Kremlin catering contacts.
Investigations by CAR authorities and the Russian foreign ministry concluded the journalists had been ambushed by men wearing turbans and speaking Arabic. Another investigation by the Kremlin-aligned and Prigozhin-backed RIA FAN news agency claimed that a French mercenary, under the protection of French secret services, was behind the killings.
However, despite these investigations, or because of them, the families of the victims, their colleagues, and Mikhail Khodorkovsky, an exiled Russian billionaire and leading Putin critic who funded the journalists on their fatal assignment, have kept digging. A new piece in The Daily Beast last week examines the most recent investigation into the murders, conducted by Dossier Center, an investigative unit funded by Khodorkovsky.
For the report, the investigating team has conducted new interviews, studied billing records, transportation and communications data and concluded that the journalists had been surveilled, set up and “the murders were deliberate and professionally executed.” The report also says that a Prigozhin-backed disinformation campaign was then mounted to impede any independent investigation. “The involvement of a number of Russian citizens, in particular, employees of companies affiliated with Yevgeny Prigozhin, is being concealed or denied,” concludes the report.