By YURI BAGROV, Associated Press Writer
VLADIKAVKAZ, Russia - A car bomb exploded Tuesday night in a parking lot in Vladikavkaz, a southern Russian city near the war-ravaged Chechen Republic, killing at least one person and wounding several.
Heavy smoke filled the area as firefighters battled flames. The blast shattered glass in buildings near the lot, which was adjacent to a bank and about 200 yards from the city's central marketplace.
Federal Security Service spokesman in Moscow said a woman pedestrian was killed and several soldiers who were passing by in a truck were hurt.
The deputy head of the provincial security council, Alexander Burayev, said there was no immediate indication of whether the blast was related to the conflict in Chechnya.
Vladikavkaz is the capital of the province of North Ossetia, to the west of Chechnya, where separatist rebels and Russian forces have been fighting since 1999.
Russian officials have blamed previous bombings in the region on Chechen rebels.
A March 1999 bombing in the city's central market killed 55 people and wounded 168. Four men were convicted and given sentences up to life in prison for the bombing.
The group was also implicated in a May 1999 bombing at a military outpost that killed four and injured 17, a June 1999 blast in Vladikavkaz that injured 17 and the abduction of three Russian soldiers.
Tue Feb 3, 8:20 AM ET
MOSCOW - A small bomb went off near the apartment of a journalist who has criticized President Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin, and the journalist expressed fear she was targeted in the blast.
The explosives detonated Monday against the door of an apartment across the hall from the apartment of Yelena Tregubova, causing no casualties, Moscow police spokesman Kirill Gerasimenko said. The apartment was empty and nobody had lived there since 2000, he said.
Tregubova, a former Kremlin reporter who criticized the Putin administration in a book published last year, said she was in her apartment when the blast occurred.
"There was a very powerful explosion outside the door, I was shaken up as if during an earthquake," she told Ekho Moskvy radio.
In comments broadcast on NTV television, Tregubova said she suspected that her telephone was bugged and that the blast was aimed at her.
She said she feared that the device "was supposed to go off at the moment when I walked out, because I told the taxi service on the phone that I was about to go downstairs."
Police said the explosion was likely an act of "hooliganism," suggesting they did not suspect a political motive. "There was too little explosive and the device was too primitive for this to have been a terrorist act," Gerasimenko said.
Tregubova covered the Kremlin for several Russian newspapers starting in 1997, but was expelled from the Kremlin pool following Putin's March 2000 election. In her book "Tales of a Kremlin Digger," she accused the Putin administration of curbing freedom of speech.