A trio of Russian journalists who were murdered in the Central African Republic were investigating a gang of mercenaries linked to a Vladimir Putin ally who the feds said meddled in the 2016 US election, according to an exiled tycoon who bankrolled their trip.

Orkhan Dzhemal, Kirill Radchenko and Alexander Rastorguev were “on an investigation into Russian private mercenaries, in particular the Wagner group,” said Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a former Yukos Oil Co. chief and Kremlin critic, referring to the shadowy paramilitary group that employed the mercenaries.

“These were brave men who were not prepared simply to collect documentary material, but wanted to ‘feel’ it in the palms of their hands,” Khodorkovsky said in a statement on his website, Bloomberg reported.

Sources told the news service that Wagner was controlled by Yevgeny Prigozhin — known as “Putin’s Cook” because one of his companies, Concord Management, provides chow to the Kremlin.

Prigozhin and three of his companies were named in a February indictment by special counsel Robert Mueller, which said he was one of 13 Russian citizens involved in a years-long, multimillion-dollar conspiracy aimed at undermining Hillary Clinton while supporting Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump via social media, fake rallies and other methods.

The companies included the Kremlin-controlled Internet Research Agency, which has been accused of running a vast troll operation designed to sow discord in the 2016 presidential election.

Prigozhin has denied any wrongdoing, but in 2016, he was sanctioned by the Treasury Department, which said he had “extensive business dealings” with the Russian Defense Ministry.

Prigozhin, who’s been pals with Putin since the 1990s, denies any link to the military contractors, who maintain a training camp at a commando base in southern Russia and deploy mercenaries to eastern Ukraine and Syria.

The journalists were killed Monday near the town of Sibut, about 185 miles north of the CAR’s capital, Bangui, the Russian Foreign Ministry said in a statement.

Their bodies were brought to the capital and Russian diplomats are working with CAR officials to find out what happened, according to the statement.

The three men visited a base used by Russian mercenaries near Sibut on Sunday, the day after they arrived in the country, said Anastasia Gorshkova, deputy editor of the Investigation Control Center, which is funded by Khodorkovsky.

Guards refused entry, copied their identification documents and told the journalists to seek permission to film from the CAR government in Bangui, she said.

They were traveling at night Monday from the capital to meet a UN contact when unidentified gunmen shot at their vehicle near Sibut and killed them, she said.

Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova confirmed the presence of military and civilian instructors in the CAR in a Facebook posting, but said the journalists died far from where the advisers are located.

Russia said in March that it sent a consignment of small arms as well as five military and 170 civilian instructors to train CAR forces with the consent of the UN Security Council, which imposed an arms embargo in 2013 after the African nation’s ruler was overthrown by rebel groups.

It’s also “exploring the possibilities” of developing the CAR’s mineral resources, according to the Foreign Ministry in Moscow.

In what the UN ranks as the world’s poorest country, where most state institutions crumbled after the coup, President Faustin-Archange Touadera governs with support from a UN peacekeeping mission of 14,000 personnel who face a nearly impossible task of shielding civilians from armed groups roaming the countryside.