According to the Zambian foreign ministry, a student from Zambia who was serving a prison sentence in Russia was killed on the battlelines in Ukraine under mysterious circumstances.
Lemekhani Nyirenda, a 23-year-old student of nuclear engineering at the Moscow Engineering Physics Institute, received a nine-year prison term in 2020 for an unidentified crime.
Nyirenda, a government-sponsored student, was slain in September, according to Zambia’s Foreign Affairs Minister Stanley Kakubo, who added that the Russian authorities had recently informed the Zambian government of the death.
The Zambian government has asked the Russian authorities to promptly give information on the circumstances under which a Zambian national serving a prison sentence in Moscow may have been recruited to fight in Ukraine and subsequently lost his life, according to Mr. Kakubo. He said that the body of Mr. Nyirenda has since been moved to the Russian border town of Rostov in preparation for repatriation to Zambia. This was confirmed by the Zambian embassy in Russia.
Once official word from the Russian authorities was obtained, he remarked, “I have been personally in touch and will keep in contact with the relatives of the dead in order to provide an update on more details surrounding their loved one’s loss.” Nyirenda’s release from prison is unknown, however, Russia has granted freedom to several prisoners in exchange for their participation in its conflict with Ukraine.
