The reported death of the Wagner boss Yevgeny Prigozhin is the latest addition to a long list of known and suspected political assassinations by plane crash.
Targeting a plane can be an effective way of reaching someone normally surrounded by layers of personal security, as long as would-be assassins have no scruples about killing everyone onboard.
Crashes conveniently (for killers) destroy a lot of evidence, often making them hard to investigate and leaving deaths shrouded in a fog of confusion and conspiracy theory that can linger for years, decades or indefinitely.
Targeted planes have been shot down by missiles, reportedly attacked from other aircraft, or blown up with explosives planted onboard. The first two methods require military hardware usually controlled only by states or major armed factions; the third is more accessible to a range of assassins.
Domestic rivals, foreign powers, armed factions and terrorist groups have all been accused of commissioning or carrying out attacks.
Perhaps the most catastrophic assassination by plane was the 1994 killing of the Rwandan president, Juvénal Habyarimana, which sparked a genocide.
A surface-to-air missile shot down the presidential jet carrying Habyarimana and his Burundian counterpart, Cyprien Ntaryamira, as it flew into Kigali. The crash set off a chain of violent ethnic clashes in Rwanda, culminating in the slaughter of 800,000 Tutsis by Hutu soldiers and militias.
It has never been conclusively proved who launched the missile, but evidence submitted to a French judge in 2012 found it was probably fired from a base controlled by Hutu extremists opposed to a peace deal that Habyarimana had negotiated on his last trip.
It was at least immediately clear that that plane was downed, and the only questions were about who did it. Other plane crashes that are now treated as likely assassinations were initially dismissed as tragic accidents until political pressure or committed investigators forced a reappraisal.
It took the UN more than five decades to conclude there was a “significant amount of evidence” that a mystery second aircraft caused the 1961 plane crash that killed its secretary general, Dag Hammarskjöld.
His plane came down in what is now Zambia when Hammarskjöld was on a mission to try to broker peace in Congo, and two inquiries run by British authorities initially recorded the cause as pilot error.
In 1980, Portugal’s prime minister, Francisco Sá Carneiro, died when a Cessna he was travelling in crashed into a building in northern Porto. There was a first official inquiry into the death in the 1990s, and a second in 2004 concluded that the aircraft was sabotaged.
Some suspicious deaths may never be investigated. In 1971 the body of Lin Biao, Mao Zedong’s heir apparent, was recovered from the site of a plane crash in Mongolia. Chinese authorities claimed he had been trying to flee to the Soviet Union after a failed coup attempt and his plane ran out of fuel.
Rumours about the accident spread fast and included variously that the plane was shot down by Chinese jets and that Lin died inside China and his body was put on the plane.
In 2012, Perry Link, a China scholar at Princeton University, said of the death: “Something dramatic happened in the high levels of the [Communist party] mafia and we still, today, don’t know exactly what.”
In 1955, China’s premier, Zhou Enlai, narrowly escaped an attack on an Air India jet chartered for a trip to Indonesia. A bomb was placed onboard by the Kuomintang, the losing faction in China’s civil war who were still trying to overthrow the Communist government from their base in Taiwan.
Zhou changed his travel plans at the last minute, reportedly after being tipped off. The plane crashed into the South China Sea after an explosion and all 11 passengers died, although three crew members were rescued.
There has been one political assassination by mid-air bombing that did not cause a crash. In 1987, an explosion killed Lebanon’s then prime minister, Rashid Karami, onboard a military helicopter. A tiny bomb had been placed on the back of his seat, and though others were injured, the pilot was able to land the craft.
