Car bomb in southern Russia kills 1, injures 13

ETAIWANNEWS

A man who was stopped by traffic police in Russia's southern region of Dagestan detonated explosives in his car Tuesday, killing a passer-by and injuring 13 other people.Dagestan Interior Ministry spokesman Mark Tolchinsky said the blast occurred at a traffic checkpoint on the outskirts of Dagestan's capital city, Makhachkala. Tolchinsky told the AP that the police post was partly destroyed in the blast. In stopping the car, the traffic police managed to avert a large-scale terrorist attack in Makhachkala, Dagestan's Interior Minister Ali Magomedov said in a statement. Dagestan suffers such attacks frequently. The violence, which plagues a broader area within Russia's North Caucasus, stems from two bloody wars in nearby Chechnya and is blamed on separatists. Russian news agencies reported a separate blast in Chechnya Tuesday that injured three troops belonging to the region's Interior Ministry. This year has seen an intensification in such attacks. The director of Russia's main security agency the Federal Security Service told Russian news agencies Tuesday that he had received a presidential order to "prepare and realize additional measures to neutralize the terrorist threat" in the region. It was unclear what that meant. Russia earlier this year announced an end to large-scale counterterrorism operations in Chechnya and other regions that was introduced for postwar stability, but the attacks have continued nonetheless. Ingushetia, a sliver of land to Chechnya's west, has suffered possibly the worst of this year's violence. Its leader was almost killed in a suicide bomb blast in June. Another suicide bomber drove a van full of explosives into a police station last month, killing 21 people _ mostly police. Russia's worst terrorist attack occurred exactly five years ago in the North Caucasus town of Beslan, in North Ossetia. On Tuesday relatives of 334 people killed in a botched attempt to rescue over 1,000 hostages from a local school mourned their dead.