well - that does not count (at least for me ;o) ) … we need to see the man himself!
(It would be “remarkable” as such if photos of “nobodies” surface, but not of the 2 wagner singers, which are fairly prominent people in RU)
why would one make a pic of the pilot but not of Prigo (assuming he was on the plane)
so in a way, the absence-of-evidence might be evidence-for-absence
on a more philosophical note with regards the thread title:
we can now consider the question answered and start SDing him?
The news today came out of the blue sky for me
Hey - I watch a lot of TV. Who knows if he was already dead when he was loaded onto the plane?! 
The video is pretty simple. Damn near everything gets video’d by somebody.
As to passenger lists, in the USA AFAIK nobody official keeps track of who’s on private jets. That’s sorta the point of the “private” part. In Russia? I have no clue.
Bodies recovered? The nice part about a wing-off spiral down like that is the airplane is falling more or less straight down and hits sorta flattish doing 100-150 mph vertically and not much more than zero horizontally. Instead of spreading shredded aluminum and shredded people in a strewn field a quarter mile long and a hundred yards wide you tend to get one squashed but mostly hollow blob of metal with definitely dead but largely recognizable distinct mostly-whole bodies. Think cleavering a chicken, not making chicken salad. Of course the fact the authorities knew that somewhere in that county they’d need to recover bodies from a crashed airplane at, oh, aout 5:30 that night made it easy to have a recovery crew in the right Oblast ready to go.
If not too badly trashed about the face, declaring a celebrity dead is easy. Declaring an ordinary schlub is slower until you can get pictures from their family to confirm the identity.
But yeah, the Russians made sure they had all their media ducks in a row before they gave the go-ahead to open fire on the airplane. Or the whole thing is a very expensive and elaborate scam. Or did Prigo outsmart Putin one more time?
Perhaps his calculation was, if I flee and try to hide, Putin will eventually find me and kill me. If I go along with him and manage to prove myself useful, there’s a small chance I live.
I don’t think he had any illusions that he was safe. But choosing the path with 5% chance of success is better than the path with 0.01% chance.
I was surprise as well. I thought he was in Niger to help defend against a potential invasion from Nigeria. That seems like it would have been safer.
There are no passenger manifests on a private jet? I mean, even if they do not submit that list to the government you’d think that list would exist somewhere and if the plane crashes the government would ask for that list.
I remember Elon Musk getting salty about being tracked in his private plane (although I suppose they were tracking the plane and just assumed it never went anywhere without him on it). Maybe the same for Prigozhin?
IIRC Jeff Bezos and his girlfriend were also tracked by paparazzi watching where their two planes went (yes, Bezos had a private jet dedicated to his girlfriend).
US domestic practice is one thing. I know I don’t know about it, but @Llama_Llogophile certainly will. Even in US domestic airline practice, manifests aren’t sent to the government until after something bad happens. Reservations all get pre-vetted by TSA, but the government doesn’t have real time info of who did or didn’t board.
Russian domestic practice could be anything. But my bet is that it’ll be more disclosure to the government than US practice. Although like all things involving the government in Russia, they simultaneously have a culture of ignoring rules, and conversely of draconian but capricious enforcement of the same rules.
International practice is yet a third thing and will often require a manifest be pre-transmitted to the customs / immigration authorities of the country of arrival. Not relevant to what we think was Prigo’s final flight.
In the Prigo case, the Russian government aviation authority claimed to have a manifest with his name on it very shortly after it hit the ground. For that to pass the smell test with Russians who’d know how it really works there, that’d have to be real close to normal procedures there. Or at least that’s my surmise of the situation.
I really wonder why Prigozhin just stopped on his march to Moscow when they had Moscow quaking in their boots?
I am guessing Putin offered him a really, really sweet deal. Then, Putin having bought some time, made sure Prigozhin would meet an unfortunate accident.
Putin simply is not a person you cross. He will absolutely murder you. Indeed, he can’t have it any other way. Prigozhin had to go after that.
IMHO
Prigozin hadn’t gotten his family out of Russia first and the FSB threatened them. Seems a similarly obvious thing for him to not consider, but there you go.
Except they did not do very much to make it look like an accident, did they?
I suppose they may claim it was a Ukrainian terrorist bomb on the plane, or something like a one-in-a-billion meteorite impact, or an unexplained catastrophic malfunction and the blackbox was too badly mangled in the crash to recover the recordings, or Og knows what.
As for private jets in the U.S., operating domestically, it depends on if they’re chartered or not. Assuming it’s truly private and not carrying paying passengers, there would be no manifest required at all. But as LSL says, who the hell knows what happens in Russia? I’ve flown with some Russian pilots and their stories are beyond belief to someone who is used to how the FAA does things.
So far, it loks like Putin and company want us to think this was their doing.
The plane crash/shoot down was on the same day of the month as the June 24 march on Moscow.
Less dramatic than what I just mentioned, but the aircraft model has an outstanding safety record.
The video on Telegram is of some bizjet-sized aircraft being shot down by a missile somewhere on some day. Nothing about the images themselves look at all faked to me. That’s a real, not CGI, missile trail & detonation pattern. And a real falling airplane.
The rest of the vid’s provenance is plausible, but unverifiable by me. Can some expert someplace prove the provenance? Probably. Have they already and I just haven’t read it yet? Certainly possible.
yep, pretty much dead on - 2 months after the march to moscow (24th june)
ISW assessment:
Putin almost certainly ordered the Russian military command to shoot down Prigozhin’s plane. Elements of the Russian military, especially Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Chief of the General Staff Army General Valery Gerasimov, would be extremely unlikely to execute Prigozhin without Putin’s order. The entirety of the Russian political and security sphere likely viewed Prigozhin’s continued survival following Wagner’s rebellion as at Putin’s discretion. ISW will make further assessments based on the assumption that Putin ordered Prigozhin’s assassination unless evidence to the contrary emerges. ISW’s previous standing assessment that Putin was unlikely to kill Prigozhin for fear of angering Wagner personnel has thus been invalidated.[20]
[…]
Kremlin newswire RIA Novosti reported on August 23 that Putin formally dismissed Wagner-affiliated Army General Sergei Surovikin as commander of Russian Aerospace Forces (VKS) and replaced him with Colonel General Viktor Afzalov.[25] The official confirmation of Surovikin’s dismissal in Russian state media on the same day as Prigozhin’s assassination is likely no coincidence.
What a coincidence…not!! 
“You come at the king, you’d best not miss!”