NAZRAN, March 11. /TASS/. Four people were hurt in an explosion near a mosque in the city of Nazran, the capital of Russia’s North Caucasian republic of Ingushetia, a spokesman for the Ingushetia department of the Russian Investigations Committee told TASS on Friday.
"Four people, aged 19, 23, 42 and 55, were hurt in the explosion. They received injuries of various degrees if gravity," the spokesman said.
Medics at the local hospital where the four had been taken to told TASS three of the wounded were released. Another one, a 55-year-old man with a serious head wound, was operated and is now at the intensive care ward.
Ingushetia’s department of the Russian Investigations Committee has initiated a criminal case over the blast on charges of an attempted murder of two or more people.
A powerful explosive device of a yield of at least five kilograms of TNT went off in a car parked near the Nasyr-Kortovskaya mosque in Nazran during a Friday prayer. The car was parked at a crowded crossroads. The car was completely destroyed by the blast. The explosion damaged nearby households and about five cars.
"Investigators seized fragments of the explosive device and fragments of the car," the spokesman for the Ingushetia department of the Russian Investigations Committee said.
Ingushetia’s head, Yunus-bek Yevkurov, said the explosion near the mosque was a provocation. "It was apure provocation and those who committed it were seeking to take advantage of the continuing problems in the religious sphere," Yevkurov’s press service quoted him as saying.