VLADIKAVKAZ (Russia), Nov 6: A suspected bomb blast killed 11 people outside a Russian market on Thursday, prosecutors said, in one of the worst attacks in months to hit Russia’s turbulent North Caucasus region.

The explosion detonated as a minibus taxi pulled up outside the main market in the southern Russian city of Vladikavkaz, killing passengers and ripping the doors off one side of the vehicle. Prosecutors said they suspected a terrorist attack.

The attack was fresh evidence that despite largely quelling a separatist rebellion in nearby Chechnya, Russia is still struggling to contain violence in its southern regions that has fuelled instability and killed thousands of people.

A line of inquiry being examined by investigators is that the explosion was carried out by a suicide bomber, a spokeswoman for the local authorities said

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev ordered police and state security agencies to tighten security and to keep him informed about the investigation, the Kremlin press service said.

Vladikavkaz is in Russia’s North Ossetia region, scene of the Beslan siege in 2004 in which more than 300 people were killed after their school was taken hostage by gunmen linked to a separatist rebellion in Chechnya.

“Today in the centre of Vladikavkaz an explosion occurred as a result of which 11 people were killed,” the investigative unit of the Prosecutor General’s Office said in a statement. “A criminal case has been opened ... (for) murder and terrorism.”

North Ossetian leader Taimuraz Mamsurov, quoted by Interfax news agency, had conflicting figures for casualties, saying later that nine people were killed and around 40 injured.—Reuters