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France said on Thursday that there were "reasonable doubts" about the cause of the plane crash that presumably killed Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of Russia's Wagner paramilitary group.

"We don't yet know the circumstances of this crash. We can have some reasonable doubts," government spokesman Olivier Veran told France 2 television.

Asked about US President Joe Biden's claim that little "happens in Russia that [President Vladimir] Putin is not behind", Veran agreed that "as a general rule, that's a truth that can be established".

Prigozhin was "the man who did Putin's dirty work. What he has done is inseparable from the policies of Putin, who gave him responsibility to carry out abuses as the head of Wagner", he said.

"Prigozhin leaves behind him mass graves. He leaves behind him messes across a large part of the globe, I'm thinking of Africa, Ukraine, and Russia itself."