At least 18 killed, 40 injured in Russia train blast–report

MOSCOW—At least 18 people were killed and 40 others were injured Sunday when a blast tore through a train station in southern Russia, Russian news reports said.

Russia’s Interior Ministry said the explosion hit the central railway station the city of Volgograd near the volatile North Caucasus region. It gave no immediate details.

The Associated Press, citing unnamed officials, said that at least 10 people were killed and three were wounded, heightening concern about terrorism ahead of February’s Olympics in the Black Sea resort of Sochi.

Provinces in southern Russia have been destabilized by attacks linked to Islamic rebels.

In October, a female suicide bomber blew herself up on a city bus in Volgograd, killing six people and injuring about 30. Officials said the attacker came from the province of Dagestan, which has become the center of an Islamist insurgency that has spread across the region after two separatist wars in Chechnya.

No one immediately claimed responsibility for Sunday’s attack, but it came several months after Chechen rebel leader Doku Umarov called for attacks on the Sochi Games.

On Friday, three people died in the city of Pyatigorsk in the North Caucasus Mountains when a car rigged with explosives blew up on a street in Pyatigorsk, the central of a federal administrative district intended to stabilize the North Caucasus region. With Agence France-Presse