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Railway blast in Russia's Dagestan

Railway blast in Russia's Dagestan

By AFP

MOSCOW: An explosion hit a railway in Russia's Caucasian region of Dagestan early Monday, the Interfax news agency reported quoting police officials.

"A railway was hit by an explosion before a train travelling from Tyumen to (Azerbaijan's capital) Baku passed. The train did not derail, although the locomotive dragged the wagons some 150 meters along the damaged rails," a local police official was quoted as saying.

No casualties were reported.

The attack follows the Friday bombing of an elite passenger train bound from Moscow to Saint-Petersburg, which killed around 25 people.

Dagestan's neighbour Chechnya was the site of two bloody separatist wars after the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, and a low-level insurgency persists in the region despite the end of major hostilities.