Suicide bombing in Russia’s Dagestan kills 5 police officers

Reporting from Moscow — 

A suicide bomber targeted a traffic police headquarters in the restive Russian republic of Dagestan on Wednesday, killing five officers and injuring 19 more.

As a small, Russian-made SUV careened toward the building about 8 a.m., a team of police rammed their vehicle into the bomber’s. The explosives went off on impact, killing all the police officers in the truck but preventing the bomber from reaching his target.

The death toll would have been much higher had the officers not intervened, officials in Dagestan said. The men were being hailed as heroes.

“He was stopped by a special operations group at the last minute,” an unnamed spokesman told Interfax news agency.

“The measures taken by these policemen stopped the terrorist from reaching the site where other police officers prepared for duty.”

The bomber struck just as 50 traffic police officers were lining up at the headquarters for a procession. In choice of target and timing, the attack bore a marked resemblance to last summer’s bombing of a police headquarters in nearby Ingushetia, another Russian republic in the North Caucasus racked by insurgent violence. That attack killed at least 24 people.

“They managed to prevent a terrorist attack with a higher death toll at the cost of their own lives,” the spokesman said.

Dagestan, a mountainous republic tucked on the western edge of the Caspian Sea, is an ethnically diverse and oil-rich region that has been rent by tensions from rising Islamism and clan power struggles.

Wednesday’s explosion shattered windows and damaged roofs for more than a mile around. Investigators poring over the bomb crater concluded that the assailant had been carrying artillery shells equivalent to more than 200 pounds of TNT.

“When I woke up, ‘Bam! Bam!’ ” neighbor Patimat Aliyeva told Russia’s Channel One television, imitating the sound of the blast. “I couldn’t find my children. They were screaming, ‘Mama.’ But I didn’t see them because the house is filled with dust and there’s glass under my feet.”

Mukhu Aliyev, the president of the small republic, ordered budget funds set aside to compensate the families of the slain police officers. He also ordered the purchase of 15 new police vehicles.

Escalating bloodshed has made the Caucasus region the soft underbelly of Moscow’s efforts to portray Russia as a stable, centrally controlled hub of investment and tranquillity. Russian officials have threatened and fired officials and pledged to do better in response to the string of attacks -- but the bloodshed keeps coming.

A flare of disappearances and killings in Chechnya, which suffered through two wars between 1994 and the early 2000s, and a swelling Islamist rebellion and raging clan warfare in Ingushetia and Dagestan all threaten to destabilize Russia.

The threat appeared particularly acute in November, when a bomb derailed a train on a popular route running between Moscow and St. Petersburg, killing 26 people and raising the possibility that violence would spill deep into the heart of Russia.

megan.stack@latimes.com