VLADIKAVKAZ, Russia, Sept. 10 (UPI) -- Russian police have arrested three male suspects in connection with Thursday's deadly terrorist attacks in the North Caucasus region.
"Not again," the citizens of Vladikavkaz might have thought after Thursday's attacks, which killed at least 17 people.
Their marketplace has been the target of terrorist attacks two times in the past years. In 1999 an explosion killed 55 people and injured 300, and two years ago 12 people were killed and more than 40 injured when a bomb hidden in a bus detonated.
On Thursday insurgents opened a new chapter of terror when a car bomb equivalent to 70 to 90 pounds of TNT exploded in the busy market square, killing 14 on the spot and injuring at least 120 others, Russian news agency RIA Novosti reports. Three others died in the hospital, the head of the region's Health Ministry said Friday.
The suicide car bombing is the latest in a series of attacks that have targeted the troubled North Caucasus region, which also includes the provinces of Dagestan and Chechnya, where several Islamist insurgency groups have staged attacks in the past despite heavy Russian troop presence. This past weekend a suicide bomber managed to slip into and detonate explosives in a military base, killing several troops.
Richard Galpin, the BBC correspondent in Russia, told his network that experts believe "the different groups within the Islamist movement in the North Caucasus are now vying for control, trying to outdo the others to show who is the most powerful."
"Certainly, the Russian military forces are not in control," he added.
Russia has been fighting the insurgency for many years following two bloody conflicts in Chechnya in the 1990s. Authorities last month claimed they had killed top Chechen militant leader Magomedali Vagabov, who Moscow says was the mastermind behind the March suicide bombings in Moscow's underground railway system. Vagabov was second-in-command to Doku Umarov, the leader of the insurgency in the North Caucasus, authorities said.
It's unclear how strong the evidence against the three detained suspects is, but one of them is the owner of the car used in the attack, RIA Novosti reports.
The arrests come after Alexander Khloponin, the Kremlin's special envoy to the North Caucasus, told the agency that authorities had "leads going to people involved in this incident."
The Kremlin has vowed to help the victims of the attack, saying relatives of the killed would receive $33,000 in compensation, while the injured would receive between $6,500 and $13,000.
