Gunfire at a popular Southern California biker bar killed three people and wounded several others, and the gunman — believed to be a retired law enforcement officer — was fatally shot by deputies, authorities said.
Hours after the shooting Wednesday evening at Cook’s Corner, in Orange County’s rural Trabuco Canyon, authorities said at a news conference that they were still gathering information and interviewing witnesses.
Authorities arrived within two minutes of the first report of a shooting, and the gunman was also soon dead, Orange County Sheriff’s Sgt. Frank Gonzalez said.
Dozens of patrol cars and ambulances swarmed the bar. Three other people and the gunman were pronounced dead at the scene.
In all, the other passengers included six of Prigozhin’s lieutenants, along with the three-member flight crew.
At Wagner’s headquarters in St. Petersburg, lights were turned on in the shape of a large cross, and Prigozhin supporters built a makeshift memorial, piling red and white flowers outside the building Thursday, along with company flags and candles.
Putin remained silent as speculation swirled, addressing the BRICS summit in Johannesburg via video link without mentioning the crash. Russian state media have not covered it extensively, instead focusing on the summit and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Police, meanwhile, cordoned off the field where the plane went down in Kuzhenkino, about 300 kilometers (185 miles) northwest of Moscow, as investigators studied its wreckage. Vehicles took away the bodies.
Several Russian social media channels reported that the bodies were burned or disfigured beyond recognition and would need to be identified by DNA. The reports were picked up by independent Russian media, but The Associated Press was not able to independently confirm them.
Prigozhin supporters claimed on pro-Wagner messaging app channels that the plane was deliberately downed, including suggesting it could have been hit by a missile or targeted by a bomb on board. Those claims could not be independently verified.
Sergei Mironov, the leader of the pro-Kremlin Fair Russia party and former chairman of the upper house of the Russian parliament suggested on his Telegram channel that Prigozhin had been deliberately killed.
“Prigozhin messed with too many people in Russia, Ukraine and the West,” Mironov wrote. It now seems that at some point his number of enemies reached a critical point.”
Russian authorities have said the cause of the crash is under investigation.
Kuzhenkino resident Anastasia Bukharova, 27, said she was walking with her children Wednesday when she saw the jet, “and then — boom! — it exploded in the sky and began to fall down.” She said she was scared it would hit houses in the village and ran with the children, but it ended up crashing into a field.
“Something sort of was torn from it in the air, and it began to go down and down,” she added.
Numerous opponents and critics of Putin have been killed or gravely sickened in apparent assassination attempts, and U.S. and other Western officials long expected the Russian leader to go after Prigozhin, despite promising to drop charges in a deal that ended the June 23-24 mutiny.
“It is no coincidence that the whole world immediately looks at the Kremlin when a disgraced ex-confidant of Putin suddenly falls from the sky, two months after he attempted an uprising,” said German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, while acknowledging that the facts were still unclear.
“We know this pattern … in Putin’s Russia — deaths and dubious suicides, falls from windows that all ultimately remain unexplained,” she added.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy also pointed the finger. “We have nothing to do with this. Everyone understands who does,” he said.
According to the civil aviation authority, the flight manifest included Dmitry Utkin, who was long believed to be the founder of Wagner. Utkin’s call sign was Wagner, which became the company’s name. He was a retired special forces officer and a member of Russia’s GRU military intelligence service and was responsible for Wagner command and combat training, according to investigations by the Dossier Center and Bellingcat.
Other top associates listed on the manifest included Valery Chekalov, who was Wagner’s logistics mastermind, in charge of managing mercenaries and securing weapons, and Yevgeny Makaryan, who was wounded while fighting with Wagner in Syria.
The crash also came the same week that Russian media reported that Gen. Sergei Surovikin, a former top commander in Ukraine who was reportedly linked to Prigozhin, was dismissed from his post as commander of Russia’s air force.
Six others were taken to the hospital, five of them with gunshot wounds, the Orange County Sheriff’s Department posted on social media. Two were in critical condition, according to a statement from Providence Mission Hospital in nearby Mission Viejo.
At the news conference, Orange County Undersheriff Jeff Hallock did not provide details about the gunman or how the shooting unfolded.
The gunman was a retired officer with the Ventura Police Department, Cmdr. Mike Brown said the department was told by Orange County authorities, according to the Ventura County Star newspaper. He worked at the agency from 1986 to 2014, Brown said.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom was monitoring the shooting “and coordinating with local officials as more details become available,” his office tweeted.
Cook’s Corner has long been a place for motorcyclists to gather for live music, open-mic nights or just a cold beer after a long ride. It calls itself the oldest motorcycle bar in Southern California and hosts a regular Wednesday spaghetti night, with a band.
Hours before the shooting, rows of motorcycles and bikes framed the gravel entrance where plaques describe the bar’s history. It has become known as a community gathering spot for a wide range of people.
“We’ve experienced major earthquakes, forest fires, floods, recessions and other disasters. We’ve gotten through all of them and came out stronger. Ride down and check us out,” the bar says on its website.
The Associated Press contributed to this article.