MOSCOW — Suicide bombers on bicycles killed at least four police officers in separate attacks in Chechnya’s capital on Friday, officials said, capping a week of violence in the North Caucasus region of Russia that has left dozens of people dead, most of them law enforcement officials.
At least two bombers approached police officials in different parts of Grozny, the capital, and detonated their explosives in what appeared to be coordinated attacks, the investigative wing of the Prosecutor General’s Office said in a statement.
Friday’s attacks come just days after a suicide truck bombing at a police headquarters in Ingushetia, a neighboring North Caucasus republic. The blast killed at least 25 people and wounded about 280, according to the most recent government figures, the Interfax news agency reported. In Ingushetia on Friday, a police officer was shot to death in his car.
After a lull in recent years, violence has grown more frequent in the North Caucasus, particularly in Chechnya, where federal forces fought two bloody wars to subdue a potent separatist movement. The bloodshed has sharply increased this summer, with almost daily attacks on the police and government officials.
The violence has undermined the government’s once rosy depictions of the situation in the North Caucasus, a recalcitrant, predominantly Muslim region in Russia’s south. Now, even among top officials, there appears to be an increasing sense of unease.
“A short time ago, there was a growing impression that the situation in the Caucasus as regards terrorism, had substantially improved,” President Dmitri A. Medvedev of Russia said at a meeting of top law enforcement officials on Wednesday. “Unfortunately, recent events have shown that this is not so. If our work stops, we will begin to see more serious incidents.”
A spate of suicide bombings, often carried out by the wives of dead Chechen fighters, gripped Chechnya and other parts of Russia during the height of the second war in Chechnya from 2000 to 2004. There was no immediate evidence that Friday’s bombers were women, and until recently the tactic had all but disappeared.
Then in late July, a suicide attack in Grozny killed six people, including four police officers.
Also on Friday, a Russian jihadist group said in a letter posted to a Chechen separatist Web site that it used a grenade to cause a disaster at a hydroelectric plant in Siberia on Monday. The death toll rose to nearly 50 people, with more than 20 still missing, officials said Friday.
The Russian government has dismissed the claim, saying that no evidence of explosives has been found at the site.
No comments:
Post a Comment