A suicide truck bomber killed 20 people and wounded 138 at a police headquarters in Ingushetia on Monday, the deadliest attack in the mainly Muslim North Caucasus since 2005 and a fresh threat to Moscow's control of its southern flank.
-- 138 wounded in attack on local police headquarters
-- Bomb explodes as officers line up for roll call
-- Deadliest attack in North Caucasus since 2005
-- Kremlin fires Ingush interior minister over attack
President Dmitry Medvedev sacked Ingushetia's interior minister after the bombing, the latest in a string of assaults blamed on Islamist insurgents against police and politicians in Russia's poorest region that borders Chechnya. The bomb, packed into a yellow truck, exploded at the gates of the main police station in Nazran, Ingushetia's largest city, as officers lined up at the start of their day.
Thick smoke billowed from the remains of the police station and firemen fought flames near the mangled gate of the compound. Dozens of people sifted through rubble and wrecked cars were scattered around a 4-metre (13 ft) wide crater. "This act of terror could have been averted," Medvedev told senior officials in the southern Russian city of Astrakhan. Ingush leader Yunus-Bek Yevkurov, who is recovering after a suicide bomb attack in June, said Monday's blast was aimed at destabilising 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 (HRW) 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." The attack was the bloodiest in Ingushetia since 92 people were killed when Chechen rebels took over the centre of Nazran in 2004, 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 Nalchik in 2005 in the nearby Kabardino-Balkaria region. Relatives crowded around a hand-written list of the dead at a local hospital and authorities declared three days of mourning. Moscow sent an aeroplane with doctors aboard to evacuate the severely injured and bring them to other Russian cities for immediate treatment, the emergencies ministry said.
Estimates of the size of the bomb varied, but a source in the local prosecutor's office said it was equivalent to one tonne of TNT. "The bomb could be heard throughout the city," said resident Timur Akiyev. Residents were evacuated from a neighbouring apartment block, whose windows were shattered by the blast.
Ingushetia has been plagued by violence in recent months. Locals say the insurgency has been fuelled by a mix of desperate poverty, Islamic radicalism and heavy handed actions by the local security services. Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov, an ex-rebel turned Kremlin loyalist, said Monday's bomb underscored his region's need to fight militants together with Ingushetia. "We have a common enemy and a common goal - to neutralise it (terrorism)," he was quoted as saying by RIA news agency.
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