In Mali, more than a week after the defeat of the army and mercenaries of the Wagner group in Tinzaouatène, a beheading video has gone viral on social media in recent hours. Internet users who share it claim that it came from a phone belonging to a Russian paramilitary killed by CSP rebels. While members of the Wagner group have already committed such atrocities against civilians in Mali, this video has been taken out of context.
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The video is unbearable. For twenty-six seconds, we see several men beheading four people who are bound hand and foot, on the ground, with axes, machetes and pickaxes. There is nothing to identify the killers or to geolocate or date the scene filmed in the middle of the night. Several logos of the Wagner group, as well as a watermark ” Wagner Group » appear on the images.
On the sound side, music from the Brazilian trash metal group, Sepultura, accompanies the screams of the victims. This is what Russian fascists are doing in Mali, it’s inhumane ” comments an Internet user who claims that the video comes from the phone of a dead Russian mercenary during the clashes in Tinzaouatène, in the north of Maliat the end of July 2024.
According to our research, this video appeared on Ukrainian Telegram channels before being posted on X (formerly Twitter). Internet users attribute it directly to the Wagner group. In reality, however, this video is taken out of context and has no connection with Russian paramilitaries and Mali.
A Settling of Scores in Mexico
Several English and Spanish-language press and blog articles mentioned these images in February 2019. We learn that they were broadcast by Grupo Sombra, a criminal cell of the Gulf Cartel, which is sowing terror in Mexico.
The original video lasts five minutes. We can hear the executioners speaking in Spanish, directly threatening members of an opposing gang. Someone therefore recovered these images, isolated a twenty-six second extract and affixed logos of the Wagner group. A fake news story, viewed several million times, in a very disrupted information context in recent days in the Sahel.
Documented abuses
If this video is wrongly attributed to the Wagner group, it should not make us forget that Malian civilians were indeed beheaded by the Malian army and its Wagner auxiliaries, notably in Ersane in the Gao region, in October 2023. Several exactions of this kind, committed by the Fama and their deputy Wagner, have been documented by the NGO Human Rights Watch.