Gunmen shot and killed a top judge as she dropped her children off at school in Russia's violent North Caucasus Wednesday, officials said. Five other people were reported wounded, including a small child.
The daylight killing in Ingushetia highlighted the spiraling violence in the region, plagued by years of poverty, corruption, the growth of radical Islam and nearly 15 years of fighting in Chechnya.
In Dagestan, a province east of Chechnya, militants battled police forces after attacking a police post with automatic weapons and mortars. Hours earlier, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev paid a televised visit to the region in an effort to showcase official efforts to stamp out the violence.
The violence, along with last week's sniper assassination of Dagestan's top law enforcement officer, raised serious doubts about Kremlin efforts to calm the North Caucasus.
In Ingushetia, the van carrying Aza Gazgireeva, a deputy chief justice of the regional Supreme Court, was attacked opposite a kindergarten in the region's main city, Nazran. She had just dropped her children off at the school, said Madina Khadzaeva, an Interior Ministry spokeswoman.
Gazgireeva died later at a hospital, she said. Five other people were wounded, including a 1-year-old girl who was not Gazgireeva's daughter, emergency officials said.
Russian news agencies quoted investigators as saying Gazgireeva likely was killed for her role in investigating a Chechen militants' attack on Ingush police forces in 2004.
Ingushetia is home to hundreds of refugees from the wars in Chechnya, to the south, and is one Russia's poorest regions.
Dagestan has also experienced a spike in attacks on police and government officials. Last week, a sniper killed the region's interior minister as he stood outside a wedding celebration.
That killing prompted Medvedev's unannounced visit Tuesday to Dagestan, where he went to police bases and reviewed troops _ lavishly covered by state-controlled TV. Medvedev blamed what he called foreign "freaks" for inciting the violence, "extremism supplied to us from abroad."
Hours after Medvedev left Dagestan, a riot police officer was shot and killed as he headed home after work not far from a base where Medvedev had watched counterterrorism exercises. In another part of the Dagestan capital, a road police officer was killed after trying to stop a car to check documents.
Before dawn Wednesday, a group of 10 gunmen attacked a police post with automatic weapons and mortars in southern Dagestan, battling police troops for more than an hour. The gunmen later escaped into the forested mountains, said regional Interior Ministry spokesman Mark Tolchinsky.
He said no casualties were reported among law enforcement officers; it was unclear whether the gunmen suffered casualties.
The Kremlin in April announced a formal end to what it called counterterrorism operations in Chechnya, handing over control for police operations to Chechya's leader, Ramzan Kadyrov. But rights groups say Kadyrov's paramilitary forces have committed widespread rights abuses, including abductions of innocent civilians. That has fueled anger toward Kadryov's government and may be pushing some Chechens to join insurgents or criminal groups fighting the government.
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Associated Press writers Arsen Mollayev in Makhachkala and Sergei Venyavsky in Rostov-on-Don contributed to this report.
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