Car bomb blast kills seven in Russia
A powerful car-bomb blast apparently set off by a suicide attacker killed a high-level police official, two of his bodyguards and four civilians in southern Russia’s Ingushetia region today.
Ingushetia’s Deputy Interior Minister Dzhabrail Kostoyev was riding to work in an armoured car when a vehicle packed with explosives blocked a road on the outskirts of the region’s main city of Nazran and blew up, said regional police officials and a spokesman for the Interior Ministry branch in southern Russia.
According to preliminary information, a suicide attacker was in the car that exploded, said the spokesman, Roman Shchekotin.
He said Kostoyev had been travelling to work in Nazran in a column of three cars.
Four civilians in at least one passing car were also killed, an official in the Ingush Interior Ministry said.
Russian news agencies said they were innocent bystanders.
Ingushetia, adjacent to war-ravaged Chechnya in Russia’s restive North Caucasus, has been plagued by militant attacks, many targeting law enforcement officials and facilities.
A concerted attack targeting police in Ingushetia in June 2004 killed 92 people.
Kostoyev, then Nazran’s police chief, was wounded in August when unknown assailants detonated a radio-controlled land mine as his car was passing.
The ITAR-Tass news agency reported that a mortar shell hit his office in a February 2005 attack, but that he was not there at the time, and RIA-Novosti said his home in the village of Ekazhevo was hit by gunfire twice late last year.
