“Dear Allison, baby, you are asking too many questions today,” he said in the audio recording on Thursday. “I am busy searching my garden plot for the corpse of your colleague, and you are asking me about some new events.”
Prigozhin’s ominous statement about corpse-hunting in his garden is likely a reference to an earlier message the mercenary boss provided to The Daily Beast, when asked about the arrest of Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich.
Gershkovich, a U.S. citizen, was arrested on espionage charges in Russia on Thursday morning. According to some local reports, the journalist was reporting on the Wagner Group before he was detained in Yekaterinburg.
When asked about Gershkovich’s arrest, Prigozhin said in a statement to The Daily Beast that he would be willing to “check the torture cellar in my house to see if he’s there.”
“At first glance, I didn’t see him among the American journalists I keep there by the dozens. I can, if you want, also look at the fresh graves of foreign journalists on my house plot. But if I’m not mistaken, we didn’t bury him there either,” he said.