Moscow, April 19: A bomb exploded beneath a high-ranking police official’s car in Russia’s North Caucasus province of Ingushetia on Monday, slightly injuring his driver, authorities said.
The official, an acting deputy interior minister in violence-plagued Ingushetia, was not in the car at the time of the blast in the province’s main city of Nazran, the Interior Ministry said.
Ingushetia borders Chechnya and is beset by frequent attacks targeting law enforcement officers, part of a surge of violence in the North Cacausus a decade after major fighting subsided in wars pitting government forces against Chechen separatists.
On April 5, a suicide bomber killed two police officers and injured four others in the Ingush town of Karabulak, and a subsequent car-bomb blast injured nine other people, mostly police.
Most of the recent violence has occurred in Ingushetia, Chechnya and neighbouring Dagestan, but twin suicide bombings blamed on female attackers from Dagestan killed at least 40 people in Moscow’s metro on March 29.
The ethnic-Chechen leader of separatist Islamic militants seeking a Sharia-based pan-Caucasus state claimed responsibility for the Moscow attacks.
The Kremlin has vowed to crack down on militants in the region and to address the poverty, corruption and abuse of authority that are fuelling the insurgency in the North Caucasus, a strip of heavily Muslim provinces in southern Russia.
—-Agencies