(Reuters) - The co-founder and military commander of the Russian mercenary group Wagner was buried near Moscow on Thursday, after dying in an unexplained plane crash that also killed his boss Yevgeny Prigozhin.
Dmitry Utkin, 53, whose call-sign"Wagner" gave the private army its name, was buried in Mytishchi, on the outskirts of the capital, in a ceremony cordoned off by Russian military police, according to the popular online news channel Shot.
Before helping to found Wagner as Prigozhin's shadowy right-hand man, Utkin served as a special forces officer in the GRU military intelligence service, where he held the rank of lieutenant colonel. At the end of June, a source told Reuters that Utkin was the leader of an armed convoy of Wagner mutineers that advanced towards Moscow to back Prigozhin's demand that the military leadership resign over its failures in what Moscow calls its"special military operation" in Ukraine.
Utkin, Prigozhin and Wagner's head of logistics, Valery Chekalov, were among 10 people who died when Prigozhin's Embraer Legacy 600 private jet plunged from the sky north of Moscow on Aug. 23.
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