Ingush leader wounded in suicide bombing attack

[June 22, 2009]  NAZRAN, Russia (AP) -- A suicide car bomber drove into the convoy of the president of the troubled Russian region of Ingushetia Monday and detonated the vehicle, critically wounding the president and killing two bodyguards, officials said.

Yunus Bek Yevkurov was the third top official to be wounded or killed in the region bordering Chechnya in the past three weeks and the fourth in Russia's turbulent North Caucasus this month.

The bombing was a sharp escalation of the attacks that have targeted police and government officials in the North Caucasus with growing frequency, and provided more evidence of their effectiveness.

The explosion occurred around 8:30 a.m. as Yevkurov traveled outside the Ingush regional center, Nazran. A car maneuvered around a police escort vehicle and drove directly into the convoy and then exploded, said Svetlana Gorbakova, a spokeswoman for the Ingush Investigative Committee.

Yevkurov's spokesman Kaloi Akhilgov said he suffered a serious concussion and broken ribs, but his life was not danger. However, hospital officials and emergency officials said Yevkurov was in critical condition, with burns, brain injuries and damage to internal organs.

Akhilgov refuse to comment on Russian media reports that Yevkurov was being urgently flown to Moscow for treatment.

Two bodyguards, including Yevkurov's driver, were killed in the attack and one other was wounded, officials said.

An Associated Press photographer on the scene saw Yevkurov's burnt-out armored sedan standing in the grass off the roadside, its windows shattered, its wheels missing and most of its front end destroyed. Shrapnel was scattered for hundreds of meters (yards) and there was blood on the ground in several places. Two roadside houses had their roofs damaged and their windows shattered.

Ingushetia is home to hundreds of refugees from the wars in Chechnya, to the east, and is one of Russia's poorest regions. Like other North Caucasus regions, it has seen an alarming spike in violence in recent years.

Much of the violence is linked to the two separatist wars that ravaged Chechnya over the past 15 years, but persistent poverty, corruption, feuding ethnic groups and the rise of radical Islam also are blamed.

Law enforcement forces have been conducting sweeps of the forested regions along Ingushetia's border with Chechnya in recent months, trying to keep militants from moving into Ingushetia.

On June 10, gunmen killed the region's deputy chief Supreme Court justice opposite a kindergarten in Nazran as she dropped her children off. Three days later, the region's former deputy prime minister was gunned down as he stood outside his home in Nazran.

On June 5, the top law enforcement officer of another North Caucasus region, Dagestan, was killed by a sniper as he stood outside a restaurant where a wedding was taking place.

That killing prompted Russian President Dmitry Medvedev to travel to Dagestan to showcase the Kremlin's campaign to bring calm to the North Caucasus.

Medvedev, meeting top security officials in Moscow Monday, linked the attack to federal and local efforts to calm Ingushetia.

"The president of Ingushetia has done a lot to bring order and but also to bring a civil peace to the region. The bandits actively dislike this," he said in televised comments. "Of course everything that has happened is a consequence of the strengthening of the position of the administration and their work in all forms."

Ingush officials imposed a curfew in Nazran, tightening security, restricting traffic and taking other security measures.

Yevkurov was appointed president in October after the Kremlin forced out the region's longtime leader Murat Zyazikov. A former KGB agent, Zyazikov was widely reviled by many Ingush for constant security sweeps and widespread abductions of civilians by law enforcement officers. Yevkurov used to work for Russia's foreign intelligence service, GRU.

Suicide bombings have been rare in Russia in recent years -- the most recent occurring in May when a person detonated explosives outside police headquarters in the Chechen capital Grozny, killing four police officers and wounding five.

Akhilgov noted that Monday was the fifth anniversary of the brazen nighttime attacks on police and government in Nazran and other parts of Ingushetia. Nearly six dozen people -- most of them police -- died in the June 2004 attacks, which were planned by the late Chechen warlord Shamil Basayev.

Alexei Malashenko, a North Caucasus expert at the Moscow Carnegie Center, said he believes Islamic radicals, who were deeply involved in the insurgency in Chechnya, were behind the recent violence in Ingushetia.

"It's a real threat and it will continue," he said.

[Associated Press; By SHAMSUDIN BOKOV and MIKE ECKEL]

Eckel reported from Moscow. Associated Press writers Musa Sadulayev in Nazran and Sergei Venyavsky in Rostov-on-Don contributed to this report.

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