MOSCOW — Six people were killed in Grozny, the capital of Chechnya, on Sunday when a suicide bomber detonated explosives outside a theater as a crowd gathered for a performance. The bombing was the second in the city this month.
Police officers had stopped the man a dozen or so yards from the theater’s entrance, news agencies reported, preventing him from entering a hall packed with about 1,000 people where he might have caused many more casualties. Instead, the man exploded his explosives beside benches and a fountain in front of the theater.
Russian state television showed police tape cordoning off the square and ambulances leaving the area. Ten people were wounded, television news reported. The powerful blast rattled windows blocks away.
Four of the dead were police officers, including the director of security for public events in Grozny, the Russian Information Agency reported. Another was a Turkish construction worker described as a bystander, and the sixth a citizen of Georgia who died in a hospital later on Sunday.
Another Georgian citizen was wounded, the news agency reported. It said the bomber’s remains were too damaged to be identified immediately.
On July 7, a bomb hidden in an urn on a Grozny street exploded, wounding nine people.
Russia is fighting a low-grade insurgency in Chechnya, a region in the Caucasus Mountains the size of Connecticut, where rights groups say police abuse is as much of a problem as militant attacks.
Two weeks ago, Natalia Estemirova, a researcher for the human rights group Memorial, was abducted in Grozny and her body later found on the side of a road. Memorial accused the region’s president, Ramzan A. Kadyrov, of involvement in her killing; Mr. Kadyrov has sued the group for slander.
In other violence in the region on Sunday, police officers in Grozny killed a man in a shootout who was described as a rebel. In the neighboring region of Ingushetia, four men died when the car they were riding in exploded. The regional Interior Ministry said they were militants transporting a makeshift bomb, The Associated Press reported.
Violent attacks have increased in the North Caucasus recently. In June, a suicide car bomber critically wounded the president of Ingushetia, Yunus-Bek Yevkurov, by colliding with his motorcade on a highway.
After the explosion on Sunday, Mr. Kadyrov, the president of Chechnya, said it was an effort by militants to halt a military operation under way in the mountains between Chechnya and Ingushetia that was begun in response to the attack on Mr. Yevkurov.
