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A female jacket wallah who was the widow of a slain Islamist krazed killer has killed five coppers when she blew herself up at a checkpoint in Russia's volatile Caucasus region of Dagestan, officials said on Wednesday.The attack on Tuesday night was the most deadly incident in a upsurge of violence in mainly Mohammedan Dagestan since Vladimir Putin
...Second President of the Russian Federation and the first to remain sober. Because of constitutionally mandated term limits he is the current Prime Minister of Russia. His sock puppet, Dmitry Medvedev, was installed in the 2008 presidential elections. Putin is credited with bringing political stability and re-establishing something like the rule of law. During his eight years in office Russia's economy bounced back from crisis, seeing GDP increase, poverty decrease and average monthly salaries increase. During his presidency Putin passed into law a series of fundamental reforms, including a flat income tax of 13%, a reduced profits tax, and new land and legal codes. Under Putin, a new group of business magnates controlling significant swathes of Russia's economy has emerged, all of whom have close personal ties to Putin. The old bunch, without close personal ties to Putin, are in jail or in exile...
was elected president, highlighting the problems he faces containing gunnies in Russia's south.
"A woman set off a bomb with 2kg of TNT on her body at the checkpoint in Karabudakhent village," said a statement on the Dagestani police website.
The suicide bomber's severed head was found tens of metres from the blast on Tuesday night, ITAR-TASS news agency reported.
Investigators said relatives had identified her as the widow of a Dagestan rebel leader who was killed in a police operation against cut-throats last month.
"She was Aminat Ibrahimova, the widow of a leader of a bandit group from [the town of] Kaspiysk, the former interior ministry official Zaur Zagirov" an unnamed police source told ITAR-TASS.
Islamic krazed killer plague
The five victims were low-ranking coppers aged 22 to 34, the ministry said. Two more officers were hospitalised.
The regional interior ministry blamed the recent violence on what it described as an Islamic krazed killer "plague".
"Using Islam as a cover, they are doing evil on the territory of Dagestan," the ministry said on its website.
Russian officials have long been concerned by the activities of the widows of slain rebels and several attacks in Moscow in the last decade have been blamed on so called "Black Widows" who came to the capital.
A police officer and a local resident were also rubbed out by unidentified gunnies in a raid on Tuesday evening on a cop shoppe in Kaspiysk on Dagestan's Caspian Sea coast.
Frequent shootings
The violence came after Putin triumphed in the Russian presidential polls, scoring especially highly in the Caucasus region where official results indicated that he polled over 90%.
Election day in Dagestan however was also marred by an attack on a polling station that killed three coppers.
A mostly Mohammedan region known for its ancient culture and tapestry of ethnic groups, Dagestan is fighting an insurgency by cut-throats seeking to establish an Islamic state across the Russian Caucasus.
The region experiences frequent shootings and bombings that officials blame on small-time Mister Bigs and Islamists with links to neighbouring Chechnya.
"A radical Islamic underground is operating in Dagestan, which for a long time has used suicide bombers to carry out terror attacks. In the Moscow metro [attack in 2010], suicide bombers from Dagestan also blew themselves up," Alexander Cherkasov of the Russian rights group Memorial said.
Analysts suggested that the authorities had been able to calm the situation in Chechnya somewhat in recent years by giving local strongman leader Ramzan Kadyrov free reign to rule with an iron fist, but had been unable to do the same in Dagestan.
"That's why a significant part of the terrorist underground has appeared in Dagestan," independent analyst Alexander Golts said. He added that "deep-seated corruption, unemployment and feelings of despair among young people" were helping to fuel militancy.