A female suicide bomber killed an Islamic spiritual leader and at least five other people on Tuesday in the Dagestan region in Russia’s North Caucasus, a police source said.
Said Atsayev, a leading Sufi Muslim cleric in the mostly Muslim region, was killed along with five followers and the bomber at his home in the village of Chirkey, the source said.
The attack came as President Vladimir Putin visited Tatarstan, a mostly Muslim region far to the north, and called for religious tolerance following attacks on mainstream Muslim leaders there last month
“Religious tolerance has been one of the foundations of Russian statehood for centuries,” Putin said before granting a state award to Tatarstan’s chief mufti, who survived a car bombing in July on the same day as one of his deputies was shot dead.
“Those who want to destroy this statehood are taking aim at this (tolerance),” Putin said. “But the criminals will never achieve their dirty goals. They have no future. They will not succeed – not here in Tatarstan and the Volga region, not in the North Caucasus, not in any region of our big country.”
It was not clear whether Putin knew of the latest attack in Dagestan before he made his comments.
More than a decade after federal forces toppled a separatist government in a war in Chechnya, Russia is struggling to contain an Islamic insurgency that has spread to neighbouring Dagestan and other mostly Muslim provinces of the North Caucasus.
