THE LEADER of Russia’s volatile Ingushetia region has been seriously injured in an audacious suicide car bomb attack that killed his driver and one of his bodyguards.
Yunus-Bek Yevkurov was flown to Moscow for treatment last night, hours after a car suddenly swerved into his convoy and exploded, hurling his armoured Mercedes off the road, scattering shrapnel over a wide area and damaging nearby houses.
The attack came as Ingushetia, a mostly Muslim republic that neighbours Chechnya, was still reeling from the recent murder by insurgents of a former deputy prime minister and one of the senior judges in its supreme court.
Local and medical officials gave conflicting accounts of Mr Yevkurov’s health, with aides saying he merely had concussion and broken ribs, while hospital staff said he was in a critical condition after undergoing emergency surgery for brain and other internal injuries and burns.
Russian news agencies said the explosion had all but obliterated the bomb-carrying Toyota and had reduced Mr Yevkurov’s limousine to a charred and mangled shell sitting several metres off the road.
At least two other injured men, including Mr Yevkurov’s brother and a bodyguard, were flown to Moscow with him for treatment last night. Russia’s interior minister and prosecutors have gone to Ingushetia to investigate a blast that experts said was equivalent to 70kg of TNT.
Moscow has officially ended its anti-terrorist operations in Chechnya but is now struggling to contain violence in neighbouring Ingushetia and Dagestan, hotbeds of crime and violent inter-clan rivalries where central authority is weak and corrupt and weapons are cheap and plentiful.
Muslim radicals in the Caucasus mountains have also taken up arms against the state, but their numbers are unknown. Kremlin claims that they have strong links to al-Qaeda are thought to be overstated.
Russian president Dmitry Medvedev named Mr Yevkurov as Ingush president last October after sacking Murat Zyazikov, whose regime was widely accused of brutality and corruption.
