Two blasts, one set off by a suicide bomber, rocked Kizlyar in Russia’s Dagestan region on Wednesday, killing at least nine people including the local police chief, law enforcement officials told Reuters.
Investigators said a suicide bomber dressed in a police uniform set off the second of the blasts, which came two days after 39 people were killed by twin bombings in Moscow that authorities blamed on suicide attackers with links to insurgents in the turbulent North Caucasus.
In Kizlyar, a police official said a car parked near a school in the centre of town blew up as a traffic police patrol was driving by, killing two police officers.
He said the second bomb went off shortly after police and onlookers gathered at the scene.
The provincial police spokesperson said Kizlyar police chief Vitaly Vedernikov was among the dead. Six police officers, an investigator and a civilian were killed, Russian news agencies cited police as saying.
Dagestan, a predominantly Muslim province adjacent to war-scarred Chechnya along Russia’s southern border, is plagued by frequent attacks targeting police and government officials.
Attacks linked to the insurgency that persists nearly a decade after the second post-Soviet separatist war in Chechnya had been limited mostly to the North Caucasus in recent years before the Monday bombings on Moscow’s metro.
Agency reports said there were no children in the school in Kizlyar at the time of the explosions.
The deadliest attack in the Russian capital in six years fuelled fears of a broader offensive by rebels based in the North Caucasus and underscored the Kremlin’s failure to keep militants in check.
Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, who led Moscow into a war against Chechen separatists in 1999 that sealed his rise to power, said on Tuesday that those behind the bombings must be scraped “from the bottom of the sewers” and exposed.
Moscow observed a day of mourning on Tuesday for the victims of the blasts, which authorities said were set off by female suicide bombers linked to the North Caucasus — a string of heavily Muslim provinces that includes Chechnya. – Reuters