Sudan’s foreign ministry says Russia’s ambassador to the African country has been found dead in his residence’s swimming pool in Khartoum.
In a statement carried by the state-run SUNA news agency on Wednesday, the ministry said Ambassador Mirgayas Shirinsky died Wednesday and offered its condolences to the government and people of Russia.
The ministry praised Shirinsky’s diplomatic efforts while in office but offered no details on the circumstances surrounding his death.
Shirinsky, who was in his 60s, had been in the Russian diplomatic service since 1977 and had previously served in Yemen, Saudi Arabia and Rwanda.
He was appointed ambassador to Sudan in 2013.
Shirinsky’s death is now the sixth Russian diplomat to die since November. The first, Sergei Krivov, 63, was found on the floor of the Russian Consulate in New York with a reported head injury on the same day as the U.S. election. Russian officials later concluded he had died from a heart attack.
Andrey Karlov, 62, the Russian ambassador to Turkey was shot in the back while making a speech in Ankara by an assassin, who yelled “Allahu akbar” and “We die in Aleppo, you die here.”
The same day as Karlov’s assassination, Petr Polshikov, 56, a senior Russian diplomat, was murdered in his Moscow home. According to Moscow newspaper Moskovskij Komsomolets, he was shot to death and his wife later found him with a pillow covering his head.
Then in January, the Russian Consul in Athens, Greece, Andrei Malanin, 55, was found dead on the bathroom floor in his apartment.
A couple of weeks later, Russia’s ambassador to India, Alexander Kadakin, 68, died after being ill, reportedly from heart failure.
