GROZNY, Russia (Reuters) - Three suicide bombers were responsible for killing at least nine people in the capital of Russia's Chechnya region, a police official in the North Caucasus province said on Wednesday.
The attack late on Tuesday near Chechnya's parliament building was one of the deadliest in recent years in Grozny, which has been rebuilt by a Kremlin-backed government after two post-Soviet wars against separatist rebels.
It undermined efforts by Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov to portray the province as an island of security in the North Caucasus, where an Islamist insurgency rooted in the Chechen wars has spread to neighbouring Muslim provinces.
One attacker blew himself up at a police post on a street about 150 metres (500 feet) from the parliament compound, killing two officers, an Interior Ministry official said on condition of anonymity.
Two others set off their explosives about 20 minutes later after more police and emergency workers had rushed to the scene, the official said -- a tactic frequently used by militants in the North Caucasus.
Seven police officers, one emergency worker and one civilian were killed, Russian news agencies quoted Interior Minister Rashid Nurgaliyev as saying on Wednesday. He said 22 people were in hospital, six of them in a grave condition.
The attack took place during celebrations marking the end of the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan.
It underscored the persistence of Islamist insurgency that Kadyrov sometimes portrays as being close to collapse a decade after Russian forces drove separatists from power in the second of two wars in Chechnya since 1994.
"I am once again firmly convinced that only tough, uncompromising measures can uproot this evil," Interfax quoted Kadyrov as saying. He said one bomber was the brother of a man who carried out a suicide attack in Grozny last year.
Analysts and activists say heavy-handed tactics by police and security forces help drive young Muslims into the ranks of the insurgency, whose leaders want to carve out an independent Islamic state across the North Caucasus.
Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, who may return to the Kremlin in a March 2012 vote, have struggled to find ways to quash an insurgency that Medvedev has said is Russia's biggest domestic problem.
The insurgents, led by Chechen militant Doku Umarov, have claimed responsibility for deadly attacks outside the North Caucasus, including suicide bombings that killed 37 at Moscow's biggest airport in January and 40 on the Moscow subway in 2010.
(Writing by Steve Gutterman; editing by Elizabeth Piper)
