ON-DON, Russia, July 08, SPA -- A suspected militant fatally wounded a senior police officer in the Chechen capital and an ambush elsewhere in the region left one soldier dead and another one injured, law enforcement officials said Sunday. The incident in Grozny occurred Saturday, when an alleged rebel refused to surrender and opened fire at police officers trying to detain him, killing the commander of a local police station, Chechnya's Interior Ministry said in a statement. The suspected militant was then killed, The Associated Press reported. Also Saturday, unknown attackers opened fire at a team of combat engineers inspecting an area in the Shalinsky district in Chechnya's mountains, killing one officer and wounding another one, the statement said. A manhunt has been launched. Meanwhile, a police officer was injured in a car bombing Sunday in another volatile southern Russian province of Kabardino-Balkaria, which lies to the west of Chechnya, Russian news agencies reported. Russia's impoverished and predominantly Muslim North Caucasus has remained volatile, plagued by frequent violence blamed on local criminal gangs and the spillover of unrest from the neighboring Chechnya, where separatist rebels have been fighting Russian forces for most of the past decade.
