Russia bombing kills 20

MOSCOW – A suicide bomber slammed a truck into a police station in Russia’s troubled Caucasus region Monday, killing at least 20 people and wounding dozens in a fireball that scattered charred bodies and set the building on fire.

The attack in the Ingushetia region was the latest – and most dramatic – flare-up in the long-simmering conflict that pits radical Islamists and separatist fighters in neighboring Chechnya against the Russian government. Late last week, more than 20 people were killed in attacks on government workers, civilians and police in Chechnya and a third Russian republic, Dagestan.

Emergency workers were still picking through the rubble of Monday’s attack and weren’t certain of the number of dead and wounded. Russian news wires said that more than 120 people might have been injured in the attack.

“It’s difficult to give an exact number of dead people,” said Madina Khadzieva, a local Interior Ministry spokeswoman who was reached by phone in the city of Nazran, where the police station was bombed. “They think that they can find some bodies under the ruins of the building.”

In June, a suicide bomber badly wounded the leader of Ingushetia, Yunus-Bek Yevkurov, by plowing a car packed with explosives into his motorcade.

“The situation has been unstable since the attempt on the president’s life,” Khadzieva said. “We have had mobile patrol units 24 hours a day, but as we see it’s not enough to stabilize the situation.”

The issue of stability in the northern Caucasus is especially troubling for the Russian government, which waged two brutal wars in Chechnya last decade and then at the beginning of this one. After a bargain was struck with a former rebel and then his son, Ramzan Kadyrov, in Chechnya, there was relative peace secured by a bloody campaign by local officials and state intelligence forces to hunt down rival factions.

However, the recent violence raises the prospect that Kremlin-installed proxies aren’t able to keep control of the mix of insurgents, criminal gangs and warring religious sects.

The area is predominantly Muslim and historically has been a center of rebellion since its conquest by Russia in the 19th century. The friction is internal and external, with clans slaughtering one another in blood feuds and various movements fighting for independence from Moscow.