BALADI NEWS
A Russian-speaking man who filmed the torture and killing of a prisoner in Syria has been identified as a member of Wagner, a Russian private military company with ties to the Kremlin that has aggressively expanded into the Middle East and Africa in recent years.
The video, which appears to have been taken in 2017, showed several men in military-style clothing beating a prisoner with a sledgehammer, then beheading him, amputating his arms with a sapper’s trowel and setting his body on fire using gasoline or another accelerant.
The mercenary, who was been identified as Stanislav D by the Novaya Gazeta newspaper, is a former police officer from the Stavropol region in southern Russia. In leaked documents, he wrote that he joined Wagner in 2016 to “protect the interests of the Russian Federation abroad”.
The Kremlin said on Thursday it had no knowledge of the incident. “This has absolutely no relation to Russian soldiers, no matter what is being published about it,” said Dmitry Peskov, a spokesman for Vladimir Putin.
The victim is reported to be Mohammad Taha al Ismail Abdallah of Deir ez-Zor, whom the contractors accused of deserting from the Syrian army. Family members had confirmed his death to local press, saying he had returned to Syria from Lebanon in 2017 when he was summoned to fight but later deserted.
The men, who appear to be drunk in the video, sought to hide their identities by covering their faces. But later they appear to let their guard down, as one says: “Hide your faces … well, whatever, this video won’t go up anywhere anyway.”
At one point in the video, a second severed head can be seen lying on the ground. That person has not been identified.
The incident will serve to further blacken the reputation of Wagner, which was founded by a businessman close to Vladimir Putin.
Thousands of Russian contractors fought in Syria alongside a 2015 military intervention by Putin that helped turn the tide in the country’s civil war and saved the regime of Bashar al-Assad.
Source: The Guardian.