President Dmitry Medvedev said today an explosion at a bus stop which killed 12 people showed Russia could not lower its guard in the fight against militant violence.
Security officials said they suspected a female suicide bomber was behind the blast yesterday in Vladikavkaz, a city in Russia's North Caucasus region where Moscow has been struggling to contain a wave of violence.
If a female bomber was behind the bombing, it might point to militant Islamists who have not used the tactic on this scale since a spate of deadly attacks that culminated in the 2004 Beslan school siege, in which more than 300 people were killed.
"This event shows that the terrorist threat in our country remains. It is no time to relax," Mr Medvedev said at a meeting with senior law enforcement officials.
"Even though active terrorist attacks in our country have been suppressed, the conditions for these kinds of crime exist," he said at the meeting, in Russia's second city of St Petersburg.
After a decade of fighting, Russia has largely quelled a separatist insurgency in its Chechnya region but in the past few years the violence has flared instead in neighbouring regions, where explosions, gunfights and ambushes are frequent.
Russia's chief investigator Alexander Bastrykin said the blast may have been linked to a sectarian conflict between mainly Christian North Ossetia and the neighbouring Muslim region of Ingushetia.
Reuters