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2006-05-18 Caucasus/Russia/Central Asia
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Suicide bombing, attacks kill 12 in Chechnya
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Violence flashed anew in the Caucasus area of Russia on Wednesday when a car bomb in Ingushetia killed seven people, including a senior police official, and insurgents ambushed an army convoy in Chechnya, killing five soldiers.
The surge in violence followed a battle on Tuesday in an apartment building in Dagestan, a third region in the Caucasus, and underscored the lingering instability across Russia's southwestern territory.
The car bombing in Ingushetia appeared to have been a carefully planned assassination of the senior official, Dzhabrail Kostoyev, the deputy interior minister of the small region, which is adjacent to Chechnya and whose predominantly Muslim population has supplied fighters to the Chechen separatists for years.
Mr. Kostoyev, who led counterinsurgency efforts in Ingushetia, was driving in an armored Chevrolet S.U.V. through the center of Nazran, the region's principal city, at 8:07 a.m. when a car parked along his route exploded, according to Nazir Yevloyev, the Interior Ministry spokesman. The blast shattered the armored car, killing Mr. Kostoyev, his driver and a police guard.
The force of the explosion sent the broken vehicle into the path of another car, which was crushed and then caught fire. Four civilians in the second car died, Mr. Yevloyev said by telephone.
In recent years Ingushetia has been racked by violence, including a large-scale insurgent raid in 2004 in which guerrillas, many in police uniforms, sacked law enforcement buildings and took control of much of Nazran for a night.
The terrorists who seized a public school in Beslan which is in North Ossetia, the region west of Ingushetia in 2004 rehearsed their operation in Ingushetia and set out for the attack from a base in the Ingush forest, according to government investigations of the siege, in which more than 300 people were killed.
Mr. Kostoyev survived two earlier assassination attempts, including a bombing and a strafing of his home with small-arms fire.
Insurgents also attacked a three-vehicle army convoy near the village of Nikikhita in Chechnya on Wednesday morning, killing five soldiers and wounding six others, according to prosecutors in Chechnya, who were quoted by the Interfax news agency.
Fighting in Chechnya where Moscow has been trying to suppress an armed secessionist movement since the 1990's has declined since late 2004, lessening the strain on the Russian military and its personnel. For example, of the 82 federal servicemen who died across Russia in April, according to the latest Defense Ministry statistics, only 3 died in combat in Chechnya, compared with 24 by suicide and 18 in accidents.
But even as Chechnya has fallen more tightly under the control of Russia and its pro-Kremlin Chechen proxies, intermittent fighting and acts of terror have occurred in nearby areas, and the remaining rebels claim to have set up a wide network of underground cells and units, which they call the Caucasus Front.
Officials in Dagestan battled a small group of insurgents on Tuesday. The fight culminated in a police siege of an apartment building in Kizil-Yurt that ended with the deaths of two insurgents and a police officer.
Anzhela Martirosova, a spokeswoman for Dagestan's Interior Ministry, said by telephone on Wednesday that one of the dead insurgents had been found with a crude map of a local school in one of his pockets, and that a search of the school grounds turned up six small explosive charges at the school's sports stadium. The ministry said it appeared that the gunmen had been part of a group planning to seize the school.
People arrested in the Caucasus often accuse the Russian security forces of planting evidence or forcing confessions. The official version could not immediately be confirmed. 
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Posted by Dan Darling 2006-05-18 01:03||
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