(RockedBuzz via Reuters) – Russia’s private military group Wagner denied operating in Sudan on Wednesday and said it had nothing to do with the battles rocking the giant impoverished African state.
Western diplomats in Khartoum said in March 2022 that Wagner was involved in illegal gold mining in Sudan, among other activities. Sudan denied that this was the case.
“Due to the large number of requests from various foreign media about Sudan, most of them provocative, we feel it necessary to inform everyone that Wagner’s staff has not been in Sudan for more than two years,” the group wrote on Telegram.
Wagner has not had long-term contact with either Sudan’s military leader General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan or paramilitary leader General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, whose forces are at the heart of the current conflict, he said.
Companies associated with Wagner’s founder Yevgeny Prigozhin have no financial interests in Sudan, he added, saying the conflict was a purely internal Sudanese affair.
Wagner mercenaries, who have in the past been deployed against insurgents in Mali and the Central African Republic, are currently leading efforts to capture the eastern Ukrainian city of Bakhmut.
(Reporting by David Ljunggren; Editing by Sandra Maler)
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