Security forces kill 'Moscow bombings planner' in Dagestan

REUTERS - Russian authorities said a chief organiser of twin suicide bombings that killed 40 people in Moscow's metro in March was killed by security forces on Saturday.
 
The body of Magomed-Ali Vagabov was found in the wreckage of a house stormed by security forces in the Dagestan province in the North Caucasus, a representative of Russia's National Anti-Terrorism Committee said.
 
The mostly Muslim North Caucasus, on Russia's southern flank, is plagued by an Islamic insurgency stemming from separatist wars that devastated one of its republics, Chechnya, in the 1990s.
 
The official said Vagabov was a mastermind of the March 29 morning rush-hour bombings in Moscow. He was also active in recruiting young people to join militants and in training suicide bombers, he said.
 
Russian media have reported that Vagabov was married to Maryam Sharipova, a 28-year-old Dagestani woman authorities said was one of the suicide bombers who carried out the metro attacks -- the deadliest in Moscow in six years. Sharipova's parents told Reuters in May that she was never married.
 
There has been an increase in violence linked to the insurgency in the past two years in Chechnya and neighbouring Dagestan and Ingushetia.
 
Five suspected militants were killed in the fighting on Saturday in the Dagestani village of Gunib, authorities said.
 
In Chechnya's capital, Grozny, authorities said a police officer was killed and six others wounded in a gunbattle on Saturday that also killed a militant, Interfax news agency
reported.