Twin bombings killed at least two people and injured 13 others outside a police station in Ingushetia on Monday as a State Duma deputy called for a media ban on statements made by suspected terrorists.
An unidentified male suicide bomber detonated explosives outside the main police station in the Ingush town of Karabulak at about 8:20 a.m. Monday, the Investigative Committee said in a statement.
The blast killed the bomber and injured six police officers, two of whom later died in the hospital, investigators said.
Another bomb went off at 9:12 a.m. in a VAZ sedan parked in front of the same police station, investigators said. The blast, which was detonated by remote control, injured nine people, including seven police officers, the town's acting prosecutor and a male passer-by, a source in the Ingush branch of the Investigative Committee told RIA-Novosti.
Karabulak is a town of 34,000 people located about 20 kilometers north of the Ingush capital, Magas.
The bombings and last week's suicide attacks in the Moscow metro and Dagestan might have been organized "by the same people who aim to destabilize the atmosphere," a law enforcement source told Interfax.
Chechen rebel leader Doku Umarov claimed responsibility for the March 29 metro bombings, which killed 40 people and injured 121. He said in a video first posted on a rebel web site last Wednesday that they were in retaliation for the killing of four garlic pickers by special forces in Ingushetia in February.
Newspapers and other media outlets would be banned from reporting Umarov's claim of responsibility and other statements by Chechen rebels under legislation proposed by United Russia Deputy Robert Shlegel on Monday.
Shlegel, who at 25 is the youngest deputy in the Duma, said in his LiveJournal blog that the reporting of statements by people wanted on terrorism charges or convicted of terrorism put media outlets in cahoots with terrorists. He said the reports stirred up an atmosphere of fear and insulted the relatives of those killed in terrorist attacks.
Shlegel also challenged Google to remove Umarov's video from its YouTube site to show that it did not support terrorists.
Google did not immediately reply to an e-mailed request for comment.
The chances that Shlegel's proposed legislation would make it to the floor of the Duma were unclear Monday.
Duma Speaker Boris Gryzlov has also criticized the media for reporting Umarov's statements, and he singled out Vedomosti and Moskovsky Komsomolets as offenders at a Kremlin meeting with President Dmitry Medvedev on Friday.
Medvedev, however, played down Gryzlov's criticism, saying critical newspaper articles after terrorist attacks "are normal."
Lawmakers previously considered a media ban after the hostage-taking at Moscow's Dubrovka theater in 2002.
Shlegel is a former spokesman for the pro-Kremlin Nashi youth group, and his Duma track record is mixed. Previous initiatives toughening penalties for libel and targeting readers of erotic magazines were shot down by United Russia.
No one claimed immediate responsibility for the two bombings in Ingushetia on Monday.
The first bomb detonated with a force equivalent to 3.5 kilograms of TNT, while the car bomb contained the equivalent of 5 kilograms of TNT, investigators said.
Ingush President Yunus-Bek Yevkurov expressed his condolences to the relatives of the two officers who died in the first explosion and ordered that each of their families be paid 200,000 rubles ($6,850), according to the republic's official web site. The injured officers will each receive 50,000 rubles ($1,700).
Islamic militants are believed to have organized the attacks, and the Prosecutor General's Office said it has opened an investigation.
Militants also are thought to be behind a recent series of bombings in the North Caucasus, including twin attacks in Dagestan on Wednesday that killed 10 people and two explosions that derailed a freight train in Dagestan on Sunday.
Ingush police destroyed two bombs Sunday at an Orthodox cemetery in the village of Ordzhonikidzveskaya, Interfax reported.
Meanwhile, Dagestani prosecutors said Monday that they were investigating whether a 28-year-old local schoolteacher, Mariam Sharipova, was the suicide bomber who struck Moscow's Lubyanka metro station, RIA-Novosti reported, citing Gaidzhi Khaichillayev, a spokesman for a district prosecutor in Dagestan.
Novaya Gazeta —? which identified the teacher as Mariam Magomedova — reported Sunday that the woman's parents had recognized their daughter from a picture of the bomber's remains.
Investigators have tentatively identified the female bomber who struck the Park Kultury metro station as Dzhanet Abdurakhmanova, a 17-year-old Dagestani native and widow of a Dagestani rebel who was killed by special forces in December.
At total of 81 people injured in the metro bombings remained hospitalized Monday, including 10 people in serious condition, Interfax reported.