Moscow, February 23: A girl was killed on Monday by a grenade she found in Beslan, scene of a mass hostage-taking led by Chechen rebels in 2004, and two police were killed elsewhere in the North Caucasus, Russian news agencies reported.
The blast that killed an eight-year-old girl also wounded two brothers, aged seven and 10, state-owned RIA news agency quoted Yulia Starchenko, spokeswoman for the Emergency Situations Ministry branch in North Ossetia, as saying.
The boys’ mother said the girl found “a green bomb” that looked like a grenade in a yard outside a dormitory, RIA reported. It described the area as a military settlement, suggesting the grenade may have been left on the ground in an oversight rather than by somebody with an intent to harm.
Russia’s North Caucasus is still plagued by insurgent violence nearly a decade after government forces drove separatists from power in the second of two devastating wars in Chechnya, which borders North Ossetia, where Beslan is located.
North Ossetia, however, has been relatively peaceful while attacks targeting law enforcement and government officials in Chechnya and the neighbouring provinces of Ingushetia and Dagestan occur almost daily.
A police captain and major were killed on Monday by gunmen who opened fire on their car on a road in Dagestan’s Khasavyurt district, RIA reported, citing police.
In the town of Khasavyurt, a small bomb blast injured two people, Interfax reported.
Beslan was devastated by a September 2004 hostage-taking that led to the deaths of at least 334 people, more than half of them children.
Chechen rebels and their allies seized Beslan’s School No. 1 and held more than 1,000 pupils, parents and teachers hostage for nearly three days. Most of the victims died in explosions and gunfire that ensued when Russian forces stormed the school.
—-Agencies