Six Russian Police Killed in Caucasus Attack
Six police officers were killed in Russia's troubled North Caucasus on Wednesday in a combined bombing and shooting attack as they drove in convoy, the regional interior ministry said.
"A convoy of a regiment protecting the administrative border came under fire. As a result of the shooting, six police officers died and one was wounded," the interior ministry of the Ingushetia region said on its website.
The police had returned fire on the attackers, it added, without saying whether any were killed or injured.
The officers were riding in their convoy of jeeps and trucks soon after noon when "an explosive device triggered" near the village of Dattykh in eastern Ingushetia, the region's investigative committee said.
"Then unidentified attackers shot at the convoy from a wooded area using automatic weapons."
Ingushetian leader Yunus-Bek Yevkurov told the Interfax news agency that "We have information on the people who could have carried out this crime. They will be found and neutralized."
Russia is fighting a simmering Islamist insurgency in the Caucasus, mostly in Dagestan and Ingushetia, which see regular attacks that officials blame on militants seeking to establish an Islamic state across the Russian Caucasus.
Source: Agence France Presse
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