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Bombings target police in southern Russian

Two bombings struck a police convoy Sunday in a town near Chechnya, wounding two people on the same day as Russia's presidential elections, officials said.
/ Source: The Associated Press

Two bombings struck a police convoy Sunday in a town near Chechnya, wounding two people on the same day as Russia's presidential elections , officials said.

The remote-controlled blasts came in quick succession in Khasavyurt, in the violence-plagued Dagestan region near the Chechen border, according to spokesman Mark Tolchinsky of the Dagestan police headquarters in Makhachkala.

He said the first bomb exploded as a police patrol truck passed by. No one was hurt in that blast, but when police reinforcements came to investigate, another bomb exploded, wounding one officer and one passerby, he said.

Initially, police said people had died, but Tolchinsky said only two were wounded.

The motivation for the bombings was unclear.

Dagestan suffers from violence linked to criminal activities and insurgent activity that has spread from Chechnya. But bombings against police convoys and other representatives of federal authority, once common, have diminished in recent years.