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Cutthroats (21+)

They mutilated a sledgehammer, sawed off his head, burned the corpse to the music. So in Syria, mercenaries from the "Wagner group." We tell who participated in this.

Screenshot from video
This material was released in No. 131 on November 22, 2019.
Read Room
Society
21:10 November 20, 2019
Denis Korotkov
correspondent of the investigation department

208

The video contains scenes of violence. Not recommended for viewing especially impressionable!

To the song with the words “I take off a heavy machine gun from my shoulders, shoot my son, then shoot my mother” several informal fighters hammered a man in civilian clothes lying on the ground with a sledgehammer. Beaten is like an Arab. Beateners speak Russian without accent. Their faces are closed. The scene is reminiscent of a dilapidated industrial facility in the Syrian desert. It looks like a severed human head lies nearby.
reaction

The Kremlin called the "shocking" published "New" video with the execution of a Syrian fighters "PMC Wagner"
Screenshot from video

A two-minute video clip about this appeared on the web in the evening of June 30, 2017. Commentators have suggested that there may be fighters of the “Wagner group” operating in Syria, but no one could confirm this: there are no faces on the record, there are no signs on the people, where and when the video is recorded is unknown. But in November 2019, a continuation of the story appeared on the Web - the next three parts of the video, from which it is clear what happened to the Arab.
Screenshot from video

In the second video, the body of the man who was hit with a sledgehammer lies on the ground. A person unconscious or already dead. One of the soldiers, under the comments of colleagues, cuts off his head with a knife. It turns out badly, others help with advice: “Cut, come on (unprincipled) stronger! Come on, break the vertebrae right! Come with a spatula! ”

Then the hands are chopped off with a sapper spatula, noting: “Legs must be left, suspended by the legs.”
Screenshot from video

In the fourth part of the video, the headless body with its hands chopped off is hung upside down, doused with gasoline and burned. The participants continue to have fun. Barbecue and fried ribs are mentioned.
Screenshot from video
Victim
Mohammed Taha Ismail Al-Abdullah. Photo: jesrpress.com

The Arab press managed to establish the identity of the deceased, the time and place of execution. According to Jesr Press, the murdered one is Mohammed Taha Ismail Al-Abdullah, also known as Hammadi Taha Al-Buta. He was born in 1986 in Deir ez-Zor. According to the publication, Hammadi left Syria during the war, but returned in July 2017 ( perhaps a mistake was made in the Arab press, as the video appeared on the network at the end of June - Ed. ), And he was mobilized to reserve the army of Bashar al-Assad. Then he deserted, but he was caught. Jesr Press identifies the execution site as the Shair mine in the Syrian province of Homs.
The killers

All participants in the massacre covered their faces. Except one. In the first parts of the video, a young man in green uniform still wraps his head with an arafat scarf. He has a camera in his hands, and he is probably recording a video. With his camera, he often gets into the frame of another operator. But by the end of the procedure, he relaxes. At the beginning of the fourth part, someone’s words are heard: “Let them go with faces ... Hide faces ... Oh well, this video will not go anywhere anyway.” And the man with the camera lowered the arafatka.
Screenshots from the video

We uploaded the image of the person with the camera in the arafat through the FindClone service, which allows you to find the person’s photo in the VKontakte social network using the face image. With the first links, the program displayed an image of the same man on the pages of several users.
FindClone Search Results

Despite the fact that the photographs were not signed, and some pages were deleted, a simple analysis gave us the alleged first name, last name and date of birth. Such a man was found among the documented evidence of the Wagner Group mercenaries known to us.

Of course, we can assume that there was a rare coincidence, and the "double" of the person with the video discovered by chance turned out to be a mercenary with several business trips to Syria. But the likelihood of such a coincidence is extremely small.

The man in the arafatka is similar to Stanislav D. (the surname is available in the editorial office, we do not publish it for security reasons of the mercenary's family. - Ed. )

In the "Wagner Group," he served in intelligence. At the disposal of Novaya Gazeta there is a copy of his passport, a personally filled out application form for the security service of the Wagner Group, a non-disclosure note and an autobiography.
Copy of the passport of Stanislav D., available to the publisher

Upon entering the service, D. indicated that he served as a private in a platoon of the police patrol service in the Stavropol Territory (this information is confirmed by information from the social networks of his colleagues). The purpose of entering the group, as said, is “representing the interests of the Russian Federation abroad”. The questionnaire was completed in February 2016. But, as indicated, by this time he was already working in the “Wagner group” as a “reconnaissance shooter”.

“Novaya” contacted his wife D., as well as several of his acquaintances through a social network, by sending screenshots of the video asking if they recognize the person in the arafatka?

The spouse read the question and an hour later answered: "You must have been mistaken." After clarifying questions, she closed her VKontakte account.

There were no answers from D.'s acquaintances, although at least one of his comrade and a colleague in the police service had read the question.

On the mobile phone D. answered a woman who said that we were mistaken and got into the apartment.

Journalists of the Novaya Gazeta are ready to meet with D. at any time convenient for him.
Shair field

Arab sources claim that the video footage was able to determine the crime scene as the Shair field. If so, then there is less and less doubt about the involvement of Wagner Group employees in this video. In the spring of 2017, the militants of the Islamic State (the organization is prohibited on the territory of the Russian Federation. - Ed. ) Were knocked out of the field precisely by the Wagner PMC division. As Novaya Gazeta found out, this is confirmed by the protocol of approvals between the Syrian State General Petroleum Corporation and the Russian Euro Policy LLC, ratified by the Cabinet of Ministers of the Syrian Arab Republic on May 23, 2017.

Recall that Euro Policy is a Russian company that, according to an agreement concluded with Syrian government agencies in December 2016, pledged to conduct military operations in Syria with Assad's opponents in exchange for 25% of oil and gas production in the liberated fields. The formal owners of the Euro Policy are closely connected with the structures of the Russian businessman Yevgeny Prigozhin, who is better known as the “Putin cook”.

The founder of the company, according to SPARK-Interfax, is Neva JSC, and its head and owner is Valery Chekalov. As you know from documents published by a group of hackers "Anonymous International", Chekalov for many years held senior positions in the empire "Concord" Prigozhin. The Euro Policy General Director Oleg Erokhin, according to the editors, has been repeatedly seen on joint trips with the commanders of the Wagner Group, including Dmitry Utkin (Wagner) himself. The well-known emblem of the “Wagner group” - “trench cross” - adorns the site of the “League of Veterans of Local Wars and Military Conflicts”, one of the founders of which is the same Erokhin.
Screenshot of the main page of the site "League of Veterans of Local Wars and Military Conflicts" (currently not available)
Rest

Other participants in the video can, if they wish, establish an official investigation in Russia. Novaya Gazeta is ready to transfer materials to the prosecutor's office, the Investigative Committee and the Ministry of Internal Affairs.

The heroes of the video turned to each other, calling the callsigns “Pamir” and “Wolf”.
Group photo from the place of violence

Novaya Gazeta has not yet figured out who is hiding under them: at least two Pamirs and two Wolfs operated in the ranks of the Wagner Group. So, the call sign “Wolf”, for example, was assigned to the famous Serbian mercenary Davor Savicic, who commanded the intelligence unit, but we failed to confirm that it was Savicic in the video.

While preparing the material, a photo appeared on the web from the scene of the massacre, in which four mercenaries with open faces were posing against the background of the body. We hope to establish their names with the help of our readers.
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Tags: mercenary , murder , PMC Wagner , Syria

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