A blast rocked a cafe in Russia’s North Caucasus today and a suicide bomber killed a policeman, dealing a blow to Kremlin efforts to contain a spreading Islamist insurgency.
The attacks in the majority-Christian regions of Stavropol and North Ossetia highlight the insurgency's recent trend to spill over from the traditional epicentre of violence in the mainly Muslim regions of Dagestan, Ingushetia and Chechnya.
An Interior Ministry spokesman said a car bomb ripped through the cafe in the city of Pyatigorsk in the Stavropol region just north of the volatile part of the North Caucasus.
Interfax news agency reported that 30 people were wounded.
Tangled wooden and glass debris from the remains of the cafe spilled out into the street following the blast as the injured were quickly piled into ambulances. The explosion shattered several windows of a nearby building.
"We were sitting in the cafe with our back to the windows and before we knew it glass shattered all over us," one witness said.
The investigative committee of the General Prosecutor's office said the cafe blast, which occurred at 4.15 pm, was considered a "terrorist act".
The regional governor was quoted as saying it contained a hefty 30 kilos of explosives.
Earlier in North Ossetia, a suicide bomber blew himself up after approaching a checkpoint on a road near the border with Ingushetia province, a North Ossetian police official said.
He said one officer was killed. A duty officer at the regional Investigative Committee, a branch of the prosecutor's office, said three more officers were injured.
Pyatigorsk, some 225 km north of the Chechen capital Grozny, was chosen by the Kremlin last year to be the administrative centre of the new North Caucasus Federal District, a regrouping of the region's provinces to include Stavropol in a bid to tackle growing violence.
At least five people were killed and 20 injured in May when a bomb exploded outside a theatre in the city of Stavropol just before the start of a Chechen dance show. No one claimed responsibility for the attack.
Reuters