Pyatigorsk is 170 miles east of Sochi (OD Russia)
A car bomb killed three people in the spa town of Pyatigorsk on Friday. Pyatigorsk is only 170 miles east of Sochi where the 2014 Olympic games will be held in February.
The Islamist Kavkaz Center reported:
A car bomb killed three people in the southern Russian city of Pyatigorsk on Friday, officials said, in a worrying development for the Kremlin as Russia prepares to host the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi in six weeks’ time.
Pyatigorsk lies 270 kilometres east of Sochi, where the Games, a major prestige project for President Vladimir Putin, will open on Feb. 7.
The blast blew out the windows of buildings in an industrial neighbourhood of the spa resort town, officials said. Three people were killed, Pyatigorsk mayor Lev Travnev said on state-run Rossiya-24 television.
Pyatigorsk
Officials say the blast badly damaged a traffic police building and blew out the windows of buildings in the vicinity. (Google map)Interfax said the blast badly damaged a traffic police building. The explosion blew out the windows of buildings in the area, a regional police spokesman, Yevgeny Arnautov, said on Rossiya-24 television. He gave no casualty figure.
The spa resort town of Pyatigorsk lies 270 kilometres east of Sochi, just north of a strip of mostly Muslim provinces plagued by near-daily violence linked to an Islamist insurgency whose leader has called on militants to stop the Games taking place.
In a video posted online in July, the leader of the insurgency, Chechen warlord Doku Umarov, urged militants to use “maximum force” to prevent Putin staging the Olympics.
