3 July 17, 2003 MOSCOW

A powerful shrapnel-filled bomb exploded near a police station in Russia's troubled Dagestan region on Thursday, killing at least three people and injuring 18 others, officials said.

The bomb, attached to a motorcycle or scooter parked near the police station in the city of Khasavyurt exploded at about 10:00 a.m. (0600 GMT), the press service of the regional Interior Ministry said. The blast killed one police officer, a pregnant woman and a 5-year-old girl, the ministry said. The officer, the head of a branch of the city police that provides security to private companies and state-run enterprises, was killed in his office, about 15 meters (50 feet) from the site of the blast, it said. Authorities had earlier said that a second officer, a member of a squad that fights organized crime, also died, but officials later said that information was wrong. The ministry said 18 people were hospitalized, three of them in critical condition.

A spokesman for the Emergency Situations Ministry in southern Russia, Andrei Somishchenko, meanwhile, said 12 people were in the hospital, including the three in critical condition. He said a total of 35 people were hurt in the explosion. The explosive device was filled with nuts, bolts and ball bearings, the ministry said. The blast damaged 11 cars, including one that authorities initially believed contained the bomb. Televised footage showed a street that looked like a firestorm had passed through, with gutted cars and heavily damaged buildings. Somishchenko said the explosion had the force of between 1-3 kilograms (2.2-6.6 pounds) of TNT.

Dagestan, a mostly Muslim region in southern Russia, is plagued by violence both related and unrelated to the fighting in neighboring Chechnya, and Khasavyurt is in the western part of Dagestan near the Chechen border. Dagestan's Interior Minister Adilgirei Magomed-Tagirov said he believed the attack was carried out by members of the Wahhabi sect, referring to militant Muslims in Chechnya and Dagestan, and was aimed at hampering the work of police and security officials in the region. The site of the blast was also close to an office of the Federal Security Service, or FSB. Magomed-Tagirov also said the explosion could be linked to deadly blasts in Moscow this month that Russian officials blamed on female suicide bombers from Chechnya, and to suicide bombings in Chechnya itself. In May, a truck-bomb blast outside a government compound in Chechnya that included an FSB building killed at least 59 people. Speaking on NTV television, Dagestan FSB chief Vladimir Muratov said the motive in Thursday's attack might have been Islamic militance or a vendetta.

/The Associated Press/