Yevgeny Prigozhin was assassinated but not by missile: US

Wagner Group boss Yevgeny Prigozhin was assassinated while flying in his private jet from Moscow to St. Petersburg — but it doesn’t appear that the plane was shot down by a surface-to-air missile, according to US officials.

Preliminary information gathered by the US government, which was still being reviewed, suggested that either a bomb went off aboard the Embraer Legacy 600 executive jet mid-flight, or the aircraft was the target of another form of sabotage, reported the Wall Street Journal.

There seemed to be a difference of opinion about the cause of the deadly plane wreck within the Biden administration, with two officials speaking earlier to Reuters claiming that Prigozhin’s plane was likely shot down by a surface-to-air missile originating from inside Russia.

A third US official confirmed to the news agency that there were a number of theories and no definitive conclusion had been reached.

Russia’s federal investigative committee has launched a probe into the fiery crash in the Tver region Wednesday that presumably killed Prigozhin, 62, his right-hand man Dmitry Utkin and eight others — but the agency so far has not said what may have caused the disaster.

The purported death of the mercenary chief two months to the day after his short-lived rebellion against Russia’s top military brass sparked a flurry of speculation, with some supporters of the Wagner Group claiming that the jet was shot out of the sky by a Russian air defense missile.

Other sources claimed that a bomb hidden inside a crate of pricey wine that had been gifted to Prigozhin and loaded onto the jet just before takeoff caused the crash.

And multiple critics of the Kremlin both within Russia and abroad have pointed a finger at President Vladimir Putin, who famously labeled Prigozhin a “traitor” during his brief mutiny in June that posed the most serious challenge to the strongman’s rule since 1999.

After keeping mum for 24 hours, Putin on Thursday said in a televised address that he wished to express sincere condolences to the families of those who died in the crash — and praised Prigozhin as a “talented businessman” whom he had known since the 1990s.

President Biden on Wednesday said he was “not surprised” by reports that Prigozhin had died in a plane crash, adding that not much happens in Russia that Putin is not behind.

With Post wires