MAKHACHKALA. July 17 (Interfax-South) - According to various estimates, the death toll from Thursday's bombing in Dagestan's Khasavyurt may have reached five.
Dagestan's Interior Minister Adilgerei Magomedtagirov, who is at the scene of the bomb attack, has told Interfax that a woman, a five year-old child, senior police official of the Khasavyurt City Police Department Daitbek Vazirkhanov and senior investigator of the criminal police Dzhambulat Mamakayev were killed. The woman was in her last month of pregnancy.
Magomedtagirov said that this was "definitely a terrorist attack, organized by the Wahhabi terrorists in order to upset political stability in the republic."
"This was one more link in the chain of terrorist attacks recently staged in Moscow and in Chechnya," he said.
Twenty people injured in the bombing are now in hospitals. Four of them, including a policeman, are in highly critical condition.
Earlier reports said that a car parked at the Khasavyurt city police department, which supposedly belonged to a district department for combating economic crimes, blew up at about 10 a.m. Moscow time (0600 GMT) on Thursday.
The Dagestani Interior Ministry has said, however, that the mine was planted in a scooter parked at the car just 15 minutes before the blast.
A criminal investigation on terrorist charges was initiated into the bombing, the Dagestani Prosecutor's Office has announced.
Investigators, prosecutors and federal security experts are working at the scene.
The yield of the explosive device was about 30 kilograms of TNT, experts said.