‘LIKE ANIMALS’ Witnesses are pointing a finger at the Wagner Group over a series of gruesome killings that allegedly involved disemboweling several women. It was the “most barbaric” act of violence Nas Ali said he has witnessed since the Central African Republic (CAR) welcomed Russian mercenaries from the infamous Wagner Group, which some have called Vladimir Putin’s “private army,” about four years ago. While having a conversation with a female friend under a mango tree about 50 meters away from his home, and having a good view of his compound from where they both stood in the western CAR village of Bèzèrè, the 32-year-old said he watched from afar as about a dozen Russian paramilitaries, who appeared from nowhere, dragged the wives of two of his neighbors out of the compound, stabbed them in their abdomen and then disemboweled the two women. “The women were screaming and begging for mercy,” Ali, who now lives as a refugee in Cameroon, told The Daily Beast. “The white soldiers [as many in CAR refer to Wagner mercenaries as] didn’t listen. They killed the women and removed their stomach and intestines.” The incident, according to Ali and another witness, occurred on Dec. 6 last year. They said at least six other women in Bèzèrè were killed in the same manner across the village. “As I was leaving the village, I saw the body of a woman who was pregnant,” Malik Tete, a 29-year-old bricklayer who fled Bèzèrè to Cameroon after the incident, told The Daily Beast. “They had cut her open, removed her baby and her intestines and left them on top of her dead body.” (…) It wasn’t only in Bèzèrè that women were said to have been slaughtered by the Russians last December. In the nearby Létélé community, locals told The Daily Beast that they found the disemboweled bodies of four women lying dead in different locations on the day Russian mercenaries stormed the village in search of rebels from the Return, Reclamation, Rehabilitation (3R) group. “I saw with my eyes when a white soldier stabbed a woman with a knife on her belly,” Bissafi, a 30-year-old farmer now living in CAR’s capital city of Bangui, told The Daily Beast. “They said she was being punished for marrying a man working for a rebel group.” Given the manner in which the victims were allegedly killed, the Russians “clearly wanted to torture the women to death,” said Sylvestre, who—like other witnesses residing in CAR—The Daily Beast is choosing to identify by his first name to protect him from possible retribution. (…) There have been reports of Russian-linked forces targeting women in CAR before now. In May, The Daily Beast reported how Wagner mercenaries allegedly stormed a hospital in the capital Bangui the previous month and attacked mothers recovering from childbirth, as well as medical personnel looking after them, on multiple occasions. One of the victims, according to a local independent news outlet which spoke to an eyewitness, was allegedly sexually assaulted for hours by the mercenaries.
via daily beast: Putin’s Private Army Accused of Committing Their Most Heinous Massacre Yet