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Car bomb kills Russian minister
MOSCOW, Russia (CNN) -- Russia's information minister for the southern Dagestan province was killed when a bomb ripped through the car in which he was traveling to work, according to Dagestan's interior ministry. The driver of the car carrying Magomedsalikh Gusayev survived the blast and is being questioned, a ministry official said. Gusayev was the target of a failed assassination attempt in 2001, when an explosive device detonated outside his home, according to Russia's Interfax news agency. He sustained a hip wound in that incident. The Dagestan minister has cracked down on Wahhabi fundamentalists in the region and was given a death sentence four years ago by a joint Dagestan-Chechnya legislature, according to Interfax. Wednesday's bomb exploded around 8:30 a.m. (0430 GMT) as Gusayev's car passed through central Makhachkala, Dagestan's capital, as he headed to work, a ministry official said. As soon as the car pulled onto the street, two assailants planted a magnet bomb on the vehicle's roof, and then fled the scene shortly before it detonated, according to Interfax. Gusayev was the ethnic policy, information and public relations minister of Russia's internal republic of Dagestan. Dagestani parliament speaker Mukhu Aliyev called on Russia as a whole to track down Gusayev's killers. "Together with the Dagestani law enforcement agencies, the best forces in the country should sort out the situation and find not only who executes but also who organizes such murders," Aliyev told Russia's NTV. Dagestan, a predominantly Muslim region which borders Chechnya to the east and Azerbaijan to the south, has seen a huge upsurge in violence in the past 10 years much of it spilling over from neighboring Chechnya. When rebels from Chechnya invaded Dagestan in 1999 in an attempt to carve out a separatist Islamic state, Gusayev actively helped efforts to fend off the incursion and was singled out by Islamic extremists as one of their top enemies, The Associated Press reported. Bombings have been a regular occurence in Dagestan since then. In May 2002, 23 Russian servicemen and war veterans and 13 schoolchildren were killed by a bomb at World War II Victory Day celebrations in Dagestan. In July this year three people died and 18 were injured when a bomb detonated outside a police station. In August last year a Dutch aid worker for the medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres was abducted and is still being held. -- CNN Moscow Producer Nastya Anashkina contributed to this report
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