Yesterday, a blast in a southern Russian province bordering Chechnya killed at least one man and wounded three more, including the local prime minister, just a week before the anniversary of the Beslan school siege.

A spokesman for Ingushetia?s emergencies service said prime minister Ibrahim Malsagov?s car had been damaged by a bomb blast in the centre of the region?s key town of Nazran.

He said Malsagov, 44, and three other people were rushed to hospital, where the premier?s security guard died. Russian news agencies said Malsagov?s wounds were not life-threatening.

Interfax news agency quoted a senior police official as saying there had also been an earlier, smaller explosion intended to divert the security forces? attention.

Police gave no indication as to who may have been behind the blasts, the second such incident in four days. On Monday, one person was killed and another two injured when a bomb went off near Nazran?s main hospital.

Itar-Tass news agency quoted the head of Ingushetia?s Interior Ministry as saying criminal elements opposed to the regional administration were to blame.

Failed assassination attempt

?Forces unhappy with the positive developments in the republic were behind the attack,? Beslan Khamkhoyev said, likening yesterday?s attack to a failed assassination attempt on Malsagov?s boss, Ingush President Murat Zyazikov, last year.

But others pointed the finger at separatist guerrillas in neighbouring Chechnya, who have been fighting Russian rule, with one interval, for 10 years. ?The organisers of the crime wanted to destabilise the situation in the republic,? Tass quoted the head of the Ingush parliament, Mahmud Sakalov, as saying.

?They wanted the conflict in Chechnya to spill over to Ingushetia, but they will not achieve their aim,? he added. In June 2004, Nazran was briefly seized by Chechen rebels.

On September 1st, Chechen rebels took more than 1,000 people hostage in a school in Beslan, Northern Ossetia, which also neighbours Chechnya.

Three days later, more than 330 people, half of them children, were killed when security forces launched a messy storming of the school.

President Vladimir Putin described the Beslan drama and two suicide bomb attacks on Russian aircraft a few days earlier, in which nearly 100 people died, as a declaration of war against Russia by ?terrorist forces?.

Oleg SHCHEDROV

ARREST

Bosnian Serb accused of rape and torture held

■ A Bosnian Serb accused of raping and torturing dozens of women during the 1992-95 Bosnian war has been arrested in Russia, the Bosnian Serb news agency ?SRNA? said yesterday.

A spokesman for the Bosnian Serb Interior Ministry in Banja Luka said he had no immediate comment. Dragan Zelenovic, 44, was taken into custody by Russian police on Wednesday, SNRA? said, without specifying where his arrest was said to have taken place.

Zelenovic, an officer of the military police in the town of Foca during the war, is wanted by the UN war crimes tribunal in The Hague. He was one of eight men still at large facing charges of atrocities in the wars triggered by the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, including the top two fugitives, Bosnian Serb military commander Ratko Mladic and former president Radovan Karadzic.

Serbia?s future ties with the West depend largely on bringing war crimes suspects to justice. A dozen suspects have surrendered to the Hague tribunal this year following negotiations with Belgrade and one was recently captured in Argentina. Serbian police general Vlastimir Djordjevic fled Serbia five years ago facing a Hague indictment and has long been to be living in Russia.