Investigators said yesterday the death toll in a suicide truck bombing of a police station in Russia’s North Caucasus on Monday has risen to 21.
Svetlana Gorbakova of the federal investigative agency said another victim died of her injuries in a hospital.
More than 130 people were wounded in the attack in the main police station in the city of Nazran.
It was the worst attack in the volatile North Caucasus region in years and undermines Kremlin claims that its efforts to bring calm and prosperity to the impoverished patchwork of ethnic groups, clans and religions were succeeding.
The attack also stoked fears that Ingushetia has replaced Chechnya as the next battleground in the southern Russian region.
“Every day something happens on [Ingushetia’s] ... territory,” Russian President Dmitry Medvedev told senior officials in the southern city of Astrakhan.
“They are all links in the same chain, all consequences of terrorist activity,” he said.
Medvedev sacked Ingushetia’s interior minister after the bombing, the latest in a string of assaults, linked by analysts to Islamist insurgents, against police and politicians in Russia’s poorest region, bordering Chechnya.
The bomb, packed into a yellow truck, exploded at the gates of the police station as officers lined up at the start of their day.
Wrecked cars were scattered around a 4m-wide crater.
Estimates of the size of the bomb varied, but a source in the local prosecutor’s office said it was equivalent to 1 tonne of TNT.
“The bomb could be heard throughout the city,” resident Timur Akiyev said.
Residents were evacuated from a neighboring apartment block, whose windows were shattered by the blast.
Moscow sent an airplane with doctors aboard and evacuated the severely injured to the Russian southern city of Vladikavkaz for immediate treatment, the emergencies ministry said.
“This act of terror could have been averted,” Medvedev said.
Ingush leader Yunus-Bek Yevkurov, who is recovering after a suicide bomb attack in June, said Monday’s blast was aimed at destabilizing the region, which has overtaken Chechnya as Russia’s main area of violence in its south.
“This is a big blow to the Kremlin,” said Tatyana Lokshina, an activist with Human Rights Watch who travels regularly to the region.
“The number of attacks has been growing for a while, but I can’t remember one as brazen as this,” she said.
Rebellion in the northern Caucasus, where the Kremlin has fought two wars to subdue
The attack was the bloodiest in Ingushetia since 2004 when 92 people were killed when Chechen rebels took over the center of Nazran, said Kaloi Akhilgov, a spokesman for Yevkurov.
It was the biggest death toll from an attack in the North Caucasus since a similar attack on the city of Nalchik in 2005 in the nearby Kabardino-Balkaria region.
No one has claimed responsibility for Monday’s attack.
Web site www.kavkazcenter.com, which has links to the Chechen separatist movement, praised the attack by calling the suicide bomber a shakhid,” a word Islamist fighters use to describe martyrs.
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