NAZRAN, Russia - An explosion tore through a crowd of mourners at a cemetery in violence-plagued southern Russia on Wednesday, wounding at least six people, including three police officers, officials said.
The funeral was for an ethnic Russian woman who had been fatally shot along with her two grown children on Monday in Ingushetia, a mostly Muslim republic, in what authorities said may have been an ethnically motivated attack.
The funeral at the Russian cemetery in the settlement of Ordzhonikidze was halted and the site was cordoned off by police after the explosion, believed to have been caused by a homemade bomb, the district police said.
District hospital officials said five people were hospitalized and two others treated for minor injuries and released. A duty officer at the district police headquarters, however, put the number of wounded at six.
Schoolteacher Lyudmila Terekhina, 55, and her 24-year-old daughter and 19-year-old son were found dead in their home, apparently shot in their sleep, officials said. There were no signs of a robbery, they said.
Ingushetia is a poor province adjacent to Chechnya and is afflicted by spillover violence from the war-scarred region _ where militant separatists view Russians as occupiers. Attacks often target government and law enforcement officials.
There also is tension between ethnic Ingush and Ossetians in the province to the west.
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