Female Suicide Bomber Injures 12 in Russia's Dagestan

Twelve people were hospitalized and two of them were in a critical condition after a female suicide bomber blew herself up in Russia's restive Dagestan region Saturday, in the second bombing attack this week, a police spokeswoman said.

The bomber blew herself up not far from the interior ministry building in the center of Makhachkala, spokeswoman Fatina Ubaidatova told Agence France Presse.

The Moscow-based Investigative Committee said an unidentified woman came up to traffic policemen and detonated an explosive.

All the injured were hospitalized. Five were policemen and two of them were in a "critical condition,” Ubaidatova said.

The suicide bomber herself died. State television broadcast a picture of a young woman, her head covered with a scarf, suggesting she might have been behind the bombing.

The latest attack in Russia's troubled Northern Caucasus region comes after twin car bombs killed four people and wounded more than 40 in the same city on Monday.

Dagestan is one of Russia's most violent regions. It is also home to the parents of Boston marathon bombing suspects Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev.

Since 2000, at least two dozen female suicide bombers, most of them from the Caucasus, have carried out terrorist attacks in Russian cities and aboard trains and planes. All were linked to an Islamic insurgency that spread throughout Dagestan and the predominantly Muslim Caucasus region after two separatist wars in neighboring Chechnya.

The bombers are often called "black widows" in Russia because many of them are the wives, or other relatives, of militants killed by security forces.