Senior official killed in Caucasus: official

Assailants on Monday killed a top city administration official in the volatile North Caucasus region of Ingushetia, officials said.

In the latest attack in Ingushetia’s main city of Nazran, assailants early Monday shot at the car of Alikhan Tsoroyev, head of the city’s central municipal district, near a local market.

“Tsoroyev died of his wounds after he was brought to a hospital,” regional police said in a statement, adding that his attackers managed to flee.

In a separate accident in Kabardino-Balkaria, another Northern Caucasus region that until recently has seen fewer signs of violence, a senior policeman and his driver received shrapnel wounds when a bomb went off on a major highway near the village of Urvan, regional investigators said.

At the entrance to the village, the policeman spotted a hand-made sign reading “The Caucasus Emirate. The south-eastern sector.”

When he reached out to remove it, the booby trap bomb went off wounding him and his driver, a duty officer with the regional investigators told AFP.

The Kremlin calls the unrest in the Northern Caucasus its biggest domestic problem. The best known rebel group in the region, The Caucasus Emirate, is fighting to impose an Islamic state in the Northern Caucasus.

Kabardino-Balkaria is located near the volatile regions of Chechnya, Dagestan and Ingushetia, where the authorities are battling a Muslim insurgency and attacks on government officials are a near-daily occurrence.