MOSCOW/PYATIGORSK, September 16 (RIA Novosti) – A suicide bomber killed three police officers and injured four others in an attack on a local Interior Ministry branch in Russia’s North Caucasus republic of Chechnya on Monday, the ministry said.
The attacker drove a Russian Lada car at high speed toward the main gates of an Interior Ministry compound in the village of Sernovodsk, in Chechnya’s Sunzhensky district, around 1:45 a.m. Monday morning, the ministry said in a statement.
An on-duty officer raised a protective barrier in the road, “after which the suicide bomber blew up the car,” the statement said.
The bomb had an explosive force equivalent to about 60 kilograms of TNT and left a three-meter-wide crater in the road, investigators cited experts as saying.
In a separate incident, police detained a man wearing a suicide vest and carrying a gun at a police station in Russia’s North Caucasus republic of Ingushetia on Monday morning, a regional police representative told RIA Novosti.
The spokesman added that the man had been identified, detained and disarmed, but did not give further details as to his identity. The incident took place at a police station in Ordzhonikidzevskaya, a rural locality in the Sunzhensky district of Ingushetia.
The two neighboring districts have the same name but are considered separate parts of their respective regions.
Russia’s National Anti-Terrorism Committee said later in the day that the gun-wielding man had been identified as Salman Machukayev, who said he was a member of a militant group and, along with his accomplices, was instructed to “carry out terrorist attacks in Ingushetia and Chechnya.”
“According to recent findings, Machukayev planned to gun down officers at the police department and then blow himself up,” the committee said in a statement.
The suspected militant also revealed that another car bomb attack, similar to the one that took place in Chechnya earlier in the day, was to be carried out at the Interior Ministry compound in the Ingush village of Alkhasty.
That car was later found, but the driver detonated the explosive device when police tried to detain him, killing one police officer and injuring three.
That driver was identified as Adam Machukayev. The committee did not reveal whether he was a relative of the detained militant.
Attacks on security forces, police and civilians occur regularly in the North Caucasus, generated by ethnic, religious and political rivalries, as well as poverty and corruption. The violence is also fed by an Islamist insurgency, which has been especially resilient in Dagestan and fueled a series of bloody post-Soviet separatist wars in the neighboring republic of Chechnya.
Adds information from Anti-Terrorism Committee in Paragraphs 8-11
