A bomb exploded under a train in Russia's troubled Dagestan region on Monday but there were no fatalities, police said, just days after a similar blast killed 26 passengers on a train from Moscow to St Petersburg.
An explosive went off under train No. 374 en route from the Siberian oil town Tyumen to Azerbaijan's capital Baku at 5:52 a.m., said a police spokesman in the Dagestani capital Makhachkala.
"The train had eight passenger carriages, and it proceeded along its route despite the blast. No passengers were hurt," the spokesman said. Local agencies quoted prosecutors as saying the bomb was equivalent to 300 grams of TNT.
A bomb derailed a high-speed Russian train on Friday night on the main line between Moscow and Russia's second city, St Petersburg, raising fears of a new wave of terror attacks five years after a bombing campaign in Moscow by Chechen rebels.
A woman injured in the blast died of serious wounds in a hospital later, Health Minister Tatyana Golikova said on Monday.
No one has claimed responsibility for Friday's bombing, but security analysts told Reuters that militant groups from the mainly Muslim North Caucasus region were the most likely culprits.
Violence in Russia's restive North Caucasus republics has become frequent as clashes between law enforcement officials and separatists continue after two bloody wars in Chechnya. A Dagestani local Interior Ministry spokesman says the head of a district in the region's capital, Makhachkala, was killed Monday.
Spokesman MarkTolchinsky says the unidentified attackers shot at Aberk Gadzhiyev's car with automatic rifles from their own vehicle and sped off.
The chief of a riot police unit in Dagestan was also shot dead Thursday. More than 50 police officers have been gunned down by Islamic militants in Dagestan alone so far this year.
(AP, Reuters)
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