More suicide blasts in Russia kill 12

Suicide bombers killed 12 people yesterday in double strikes targeting police in Russia's turbulent North Caucasus, shaking the country just two days after attacks in Moscow left 39 dead.

Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said the latest attack in the North Caucasus region may be linked to the strikes on the Moscow metro by two female suicide bombers while President Dmitry Medvedev vowed not to let militants sow panic.

Russia has for years been fighting an Islamist-fuelled insurgency in the North Caucasus but the metro bombings in the heart of Moscow, largely spared attacks for the last six years, shook Russians to the core.

Nine police including a local police chief were among the dead in the double attack 48 hours later in the North Caucasus region of Dagestan, a region on the Caspian Sea already wracked by militant violence.

"I do not rule out that the same gang (as in Moscow) was at work here," a stern-looking Putin told a government meeting in televised remarks.

Mr Medvedev meanwhile told a security council meeting that "the terrorists' goal is the destabilisation of the situation in the country, the destruction of civil society, a desire to sow fear and panic among the population".

"We will not allow this," he added.

Yesterday's first blast was caused by a car occupied by a suicide bomber that blew up when police tried to stop it during a regular check in the town of Kizlyar in Dagestan, officials said.

The force of the first blast left a massive crater in the road and reduced surrounding cars to burned-out wrecks, television pictures showed.

After 20 minutes, another blast was caused by a second suicide bomber wearing a police uniform who approached police working at the scene of the first blast, a spokeswoman for the Dagestani interior ministry said.

A spokesman for investigators in Dagestan said the first blast was caused by explosives of 200 kilogrammes of TNT equivalent stuffed into a Niva jeep "in which there was a suicide bomber", Interfax reported.

The investigative committee of Russian prosecutors said in a statement that 12 people were killed, nine of them police, and 23 were wounded.

Among the dead was local Kizlyar district police chief, Vitaly Vedernikov, it said.

Russia's leaders pledged after Monday's Moscow metro blasts to hunt down and destroy the organisers of the suicide bombings who they said had links to North Caucasus militant groups.

Muslim Dagestan has been one of the Caucasus regions most troubled by militant violence, along with Chechnya and Ingushetia.

Security in the tense Russian capital was further intensified after the new attacks.

Moscow's police chief Vladimir Kolokoltsev said that three times as many police as usual - many of them equipped with sniffer dogs - were on patrol in the city's metro system.