MOSCOW (Reuters) – Two assailants armed with knives killed one policeman and injured another on Monday in the capital of Russia’s southern Chechnya region, the local leader said.
The poor and mainly Muslim region has seen previous attacks on security officials and an insurgency since Moscow fought two wars with separatists after the 1991 Soviet Union breakup.
Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov said the attackers were brothers from the neighbouring region of Ingushetia who worked at a bakery in Chechnya. They were shot dead while trying to seize weapons, he added.
Russian news agencies had earlier cited sources saying the policemen were killed in a shootout with gunmen.
Social media footage, purporting to be from the scene, showed two men lying in a busy street in Grozny, 1,490 km (930 miles) south of Moscow, as police redirected traffic.
Reuters was unable to immediately verify the images.
In October, another two police officers were killed in a shootout with militants in Grozny.
(Reporting by Gabrielle Tétrault-Farber and Anastasia Teterevleva; Editing by Nick Macfie and Andrew Cawthorne)
