Bomb Hits Passenger Train In Daghestan

Workers inspect a damaged railway carriage from the earlier bombing on November 27-28, which killed 26 people.

MAKHACHKALA, Russia (Reuters) -- A bomb exploded under a train in Russia's troubled Daghestan but there were no fatalities, police said today, just days after a similar blast killed 26 passengers on a train from Moscow to St. Petersburg.

An explosive went off under train No. 374 en route from Siberian oil town Tyumen to Azerbaijan's capital Baku at 5:52 a.m. local time, said a police spokesman in the Daghestani capital Makhachkala.

"The train had eight passenger carriages and it proceeded along its route despite the blast. No passengers were hurt," the spokesman said. Local agencies quoted prosecutors as saying the bomb was equivalent to 300 grams of TNT.

A bomb derailed a high-speed Russian train overnight on November 27-28 on the main line between Moscow and Russia's second city, St. Petersburg, raising fears of a new wave of bomb attacks five years after a bombing campaign in Moscow by Chechen rebels.

A woman injured in the blast died of serious wounds in a hospital later, Health Minister Tatyana Golikova said today.

No one has claimed responsibility for the November 27-28 bombing, but security analysts told Reuters militant groups from Russia's mainly Muslim North Caucasus were the most likely culprits.

Daghestan and Ingushetia, plagued by corruption and poverty, have become the main targets of Islamist rebels as violence spills over from neighboring Chechnya where Moscow forces have fought two wars against separatists since the mid-1990s.