By RIA Novosti,
Rostov-On-Don (Russia): At least 20 people were killed and 138 injured Monday in a suicide bomb attack in Russia’s southern Ingushetia region, officials said.
A suicide bomber rammed an explosives-laden vehicle into the gates of the police headquarters in the republic’s largest city of Nazran. The blast damaged the police building.
The toll could rise as people are still believed to be trapped under the rubbles of the building, officials said.
“The precise number of people who might be under the rubble is not known. We believe there could be some 20 people there. Search efforts are continuing,” an emergencies ministry official said.
He said a fire immediately engulfed the building after the explosion.
He added that 16 injured people are in critical condition.
The explosion left a crater of about four meters wide and two meters deep. The blast triggered more explosions as ammunition detonated in the police headquarters.
The blast shattered windows and smashed balconies in residential buildings within a radius of 500 meters. Some 30 cars parked nearby were destroyed.
Ingush authorities have announced three-days’ of mourning in the republic and pledged to pay 100,000-ruble ($3,000) and 50,000-ruble ($1,500) in compensation to the families of those killed and injured, respectively, media reports said.
Russia’s emergency ministry has dispatched a plane to Ingushetia carrying medical experts and aid for the victims.
Russia’s mainly Muslim North Caucasus regions have seen a rise in violence in recent months.
Attacks on officials have been reported almost daily in Ingushetia and in neighbouring Dagestan that border Chechnya, which saw two separatist wars in the late 1990s.
Ingushetia’s construction minister was gunned down in his office last Wednesday. The murder followed the killing of a supreme court judge and the attempted assassination of the republic’s president, Yunus-Bek Yevkurov, in late June.
President Dmitry Medvedev has called the increase in terrorist activity in the Caucasus “an attempt to destabilise the situation in the region.”