Three blasts in Russian city, two dead

Three explosions rip through gambling establishments in the southern Russian city of Vladikavkaz, killing at least two people and injuring up to 21 others.

The blasts went off around the same time in the centre of the city housing slot machines and other gambling devices, said Boris Dzgoyev, the Emergency Situations minister in North Ossetia province.

Two people were killed and 16 injured, eight of them seriously, ministry spokesman Vladimir Ivanov said.

Russian news agencies later cited North Ossetia's deputy prime minister as saying two were killed and 21 injured.

One of the dead was a 25-year-old woman, the RIA-Novosti news agency said, and reports said most of the injured were young people.

A fourth, unexploded bomb was found at a gambling establishment, Ivanov said.

Prosecutors were treating the blasts as terrorism, he said.

But another official, Oleg Ugnivenko - spokesman for the Emergency Situations Ministry's southern branch - said investigators suspected they may have been the result of a criminal dispute.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility.

Vladikavkaz is the capital of North Ossetia, a province that borders war-ravaged Chechnya and is part of Russia's restive North Caucasus.

The province is the site of Beslan, the town where militants seized hostages at a school in a 2004 raid that ended with more than 330 people dead.

The city has been targeted by bombings in the past during more than a decade of war in Chechnya, whose festering conflict pitting separatist rebels against Russian forces and the Kremlin-backed local government has sparked violence in other parts of the North Caucasus.

Russia is also plagued by business disputes that sometimes result in bomb attacks.

- AP