Female bomber kills 4 police in Russia's Caucasus

The Interior Ministry says a female suicide bomber has struck a police checkpoint in Russia's volatile province of Dagestan, killing four police officers. Vyacheslav Gasanov of the ministry's regional branch says the attack occurred late Tuesday in the village of Karabudakhkent, 30 kilometers (18 miles) south of the provincial capital, Makhachkala. He says that in a separate attack Tuesday in the town of Kaspiysk, two gunmen walked into a police precinct and opened fire, killing a police officer and wounding a local resident. Dagestan and other provinces in Russia's North Caucasus region have been plagued by near-daily attacks by Islamist insurgents, who have spread since two separatist wars in neighboring Chechnya. There have been previous attacks by female suicide bombers in the region.