About 10 minutes later, the vigilantes said they heard a loud explosion at the Chimbolo gold mine, manned by Chinese workers after opening last week. Without providing any evidence, the Russian-allied CAR government said shortly after the incident that the attack was a “terrorist act” carried out by militants from the Coalition of Patriots for Change (CPC)—a fusion of major rebel groups in CAR created in December 2020 to disrupt the 2020–21 Central African general election. “If Touadera doesn“t handle this very well, we could be witnessing a fallout between CAR and China on one hand, and tensions between China and Russia on the other hand, especially if China is convinced Wagner carried out the killings,” Wilfried M'Vondo, a member of the ruling United Hearts Movement party, told The Daily Beast