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MOSCOW: An explosion hit a railway in Russia's restive Caucasus region of Dagestan early Monday, just days after an attack that killed 25 people aboard a passenger train in northern Russia.
"A railway was hit by an explosion before a train travelling from Tyumen to (Azerbaijan's capital) Baku passed. The train did not derail, though it dragged the wagons some 150 metres along the damaged rails," a local police official told Russian news agencies.
State-run rail monopoly Russian Railways said no one was injured in the blast.
"Traffic on the railway is closed," it said in a statement. "Employees of Russian Railways, law enforcement bodies, the FSB (security services) and emergency services are working at the scene."
The blast follows the Friday night bombing of an elite passenger train bound from Moscow to Saint Petersburg, which killed 25 people and injured around 100 more.
Separately, Dagestan's interior ministry said its officers had defused eight booby-trapped bombs on the weekend, along roads on the region's border with Chechnya.
Dagestan has suffered in the last years from the spillover of violence from neighbouring Chechnya, the site of two bloody separatist wars after the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union.
There has been mounting violence throughout overwhelmingly Muslim Dagestan and Chechnya over the last months as a low-level Islamist insurgency persists despite the end of major hostilities.
- AFP/so
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