Russian sausage tycoon dies in Indian hotel fall two days after a friend died during the same trip

Russian sausage tycoon Pavel Antov was celebrating his birthday at an India hotel, and was later found dead after apparently falling from an open window, the BBC reports.

A friend who was with him for the trip died at the hotel two days earlier on Friday. As the BBC points out, Antov's death is the latest in a series of unexplained deaths involving Russian tycoons since Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Last summer Antov denied criticizing the war after a message appeared on his WhatsApp account. Antov's friend, Vladimir Budanov was reported to have had a stroke before he died, but tourist guide Jitendra Singh told reporters that Budanov may have "consumed a lot of alcohol as he had liquor bottles."

Antov was the founder of the Vladimir Standard meat processing plant. In 2019, Forbes estimated his fortune at some $140 million.

From the BBC: "Late last June he appeared to react to a Russian missile attack on a residential block in the Shevchenkivskyi district of Kyiv that left a man dead and his seven-year-old daughter and her mother wounded. A WhatsApp message on Antov's account described how the family were pulled out of the rubble: 'It's extremely difficult to call all this anything but terror.' The message was deleted and Antov then posted on social media that he was a supporter of the president, a 'patriot of my country' and backed the war."

Read the full report over at the BBC.