MOSCOW, August 4 (RIA Novosti) – Nine people were injured Sunday after a bomb exploded in a shop in the capital of the Russia’s troubled North Caucasus republic of Dagestan, according to police.
“After the explosion nine people sought medical help with different injuries,” a police spokesperson told RIA Novosti. The bomb was planted in a 24 hour shop in Makhachkala by two unidentified people, police said.
The explosion came at the end of a particularly violent 24 hours in Dagestan.
On Saturday evening a well-known imam, Ilyas Ilyasov, was gunned down by unknown assailants in Makhachkala. And on Sunday a top official from Makhachkala city administration’s legal department was seriously injured in an attack in the nearby city of Khasavyurt, according to police.
Attacks on security forces, police and civilians occur regularly in Dagestan and are understood to be generated by ethnic, religious and political rivalries, as well as poverty and corruption. The violence is also fed by an Islamist insurgency, which originated in the neighboring republic of Chechnya after a series of bloody post-Soviet separatist wars, and has spread across the North Caucasus in recent years.
