BAKSAN, Russia (Reuters) - Insurgents in Russia's North Caucasus killed at least two security guards on Wednesday in a dawn raid on a hydroelectric power station, detonating bombs which put the plant out of action.
Russia is trying to contain an Islamist insurgency in the mainly Muslim provinces on its southern flank, but Wednesday's attack indicates the rebels are now seeking to destroy economic infrastructure as well as targeting civilians.
Four armed people attacked the Baksanskaya station, a plant in the Kabardino-Balkaria region run by state controlled Rushydro, at 0100 GMT, shooting two security guards in a gun fight before laying several bombs in the turbine hall.
"As a result of the explosions three generators and other technical equipment were put out of service," the Kremlin said in a statement. "The station's work was temporarily halted."
State television showed firemen fighting a raging blaze and smoke billowing above the dam. Local media said it took almost three hours to contain the fire that followed the blast.
Shares in Rushydro fell 1.5 percent at the market open, but swiftly recovered and were up 0.25 percent above Tuesday's close by 0740 GMT.
"According to preliminary information, a terrorist act was the cause of the explosion and of the fire. Two guards died, two other people have been taken to hospital," Rushydro said.
ECONOMIC WAR?
Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has been informed about the attack and Federal Security Service chief Alexander Bortnikov said security at major installations in the region had been increased, a Kremlin spokeswoman said.
Analysts said the raid indicates rebels were fulfilling their promise to target Russia's economic infrastructure as part of their fight to create an Islamist pan-Caucasus state out of Russia's southern provinces.
Chechen rebel leader Doku Umarov, who calls himself the "Emir of the Caucasus Emirate," has vowed to attack Russia's energy pipelines and power stations.
Umarov claimed responsibility for the March suicide bombings in the Moscow metro that killed at least 40 people and last year his group said it was behind a disaster which killed 75 people at the Sayano-Shushenskaya dam in Siberia in August last year.
"I think this is a change in tactics," said Grigory Shvedov, editor-in-chief of the Caucasian Knot www.kavkaz-uzel.ru Internet news agency.
"We should have been expecting similar attacks after the disaster at the Sayano-Shushenskaya hydroelectric power station," he said, adding that it was reasonable to expect more attacks on economic infrastructure.
The Kremlin at the time dismissed the rebels' claim to have blown up the Sayano-Shushenskaya dam and officials said that the accident was caused by a sudden surge in water through the machine room, a conclusion most analysts agreed with.
Baksanskaya is a relatively small plant built in the 1930s during the Soviet Union's industrialisation drive. It has an installed capacity of 25 megawatts, which is less than half a percent of the capacity of the Sayano-Shushenskaya dam.
Media reports said local power supplies were unaffected because energy was rerouted from elsewhere.
(Additional reporting by Dmitry Solovyov, John Bowker and Alexei Anishchuk in Moscow and Denis Dyomkin in Helsinki; Writing by Guy Faulconbridge; Editing by Alison Williams)
