At least 15 people have been killed and 80 injured after a powerful car bomb ripped through a market in the Russian city of Vladikavkaz today.
Witnesses reported major devastation in what appears to be the latest strike by Islamist militants against civilians.
The car laden with at least 10kg of explosives was parked in a quiet residential street close to the market and a private house, officials said.
"Police and the leadership of the republic's interior ministry are rushing to the scene. The situation has yet to be clarified," a law enforcement source told the Russian news agency Interfax. North Ossetia's interior ministry said there were 15 dead and 80 injured.
Russia is fighting an Islamist insurgency across its Muslim-dominated north Caucasus. Bomb attacks and shoot-outs between militants and security forces occur on a daily basis, with Ingushetia, Dagestan and Chechnya at the centre of the violence.
Vladikavkaz, in the neighbouring republic of North Ossetia, has been relatively immune from the conflict. Its inhabitants are mainly orthodox Russians, making today's lethal bombing an apparent sectarian attack.
The blast follows a major terrorist strike in March, when two female suicide bombers from Dagestan blew up the Moscow metro.
Vladikavkaz – the name means ruler of the Caucasus – was an imperial outpost in tsarist times, founded by Catherine the Great, and has long been a Russian enclave surrounded by Muslim villages. Initially a small fort on the Terek river, it played a crucial role in extending Russian control in the region. It is now a bridgehead to the rebel Georgian territory of South Ossetia, recognised by Moscow as an independent state.
North Ossetia was the scene of the Beslan school siege, where 331 people died, most of them children, in 2004. Schoolchildren in the republic were today sent home, agencies reported.
