Bombs kill two, injure 28 in Russia's Ingushetia

Ingushetia's Interior Ministry said there were three explosions that may have been booby-traps aimed at police.

The blasts -- on the outskirts of the region's biggest city, Nazran -- killed three people including at least one police officer in a house, Interfax cited federal Investigative Committee spokesman Vladimir Markin as saying.

According to Ingushetia's chief prosecutor, Yuri Turygin, several police officers went to the house to check a report that a bomb had been found there, Itar-Tass reported.

The bomb exploded, injuring up to 10 people, and two more devices went off after more law enforcement officers arrived at the scene, Turygin was quoted as saying, injuring many others.

A regional Investigative Committee official put the death toll at two, state-run RIA reported.

Nazran's police chief and the head of the Nazran branch of the Investigative Committee were among the injured, the agency quoted the spokeswoman for the committee's Ingushetia branch, Svetlana Gorbakova, as saying.

Ingushetia, adjacent to war-scarred Chechnya in the violence-plagued North Caucasus, is beset by near daily attacks blamed on insurgents, mostly targeting law enforcement officers and government officials.

An upsurge in violence in Ingushetia, Chechnya and neighboring Dagestan has alarmed the Kremlin nearly a decade after government forces defeated Chechen rebels in the second of two devastating separatist wars.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has called the violence in the heavily Muslim North Caucasus Russia's main domestic problem.

Authorities blame Islamic militants for most of the attacks. But Medvedev sent a new envoy to the North Caucasus this year to tackle what observers say are root causes of unrest, such as poverty and corruption.

(Reporting by Conor Sweeney and Steve Gutterman; Editing by Louise Ireland and Steve Gutterman)

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE61I1SI20100219