ROSTOV-ON-DON, Russia – A suicide car bomber hit the central market of a major city in Russia’s North Caucasus on Thursday, killing at least 15 and wounding more than 100 people in one of the worst terror attacks in the volatile region in years, officials said.

The attacker detonated his explosives as he drove by the main entrance to the Vladikavkaz market, according to the Emergency Situations Ministry.

At least 15 people, including the suicide bomber, were killed and 133 were wounded in the explosion, said Alexander Pogorely of the Emergency Situations Ministry’s branch in southern Russia. He said 87 of the injured were hospitalized, many in grave condition.

Russian television stations showed a shrapnel-littered square in front of the market, with blood stains on the pavement and rows of vehicles scarred by the blast.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev sent his regional envoy to Vladikavkaz to help coordinate efforts to help the victims.

No one has immediately claimed responsibility for the bombing, which was the deadliest such attack in the region since a double suicide bombing killed 12, mostly police officers, in the province of Dagestan in April. Twin suicide bombings on Moscow subway in March killed 40 people and wounded over 100.

The market and its surrounding blocks has been the target of several bomb attacks over the past dozen years, in which scores of people have died.

Vladikavkaz is the capital of the Russian republic of North Ossetia. Although it is less plagued by violence than some other republics in the region such as Chechnya and Dagestan, North Ossetia has suffered ethnic tensions and frequent terror attacks.

It was the scene of the 2004 Beslan crisis, in which Chechen terrorists took hundreds of hostages at a school — a siege that ended in a bloodbath killing more than 330 people, about half of them children.

The Vladikavkaz market was bombed in 1999, killing 55. Another bombing in 2001 killed six people. In 2004, 11 people died when a minibus stopped near the market was bombed.

Russia‘s North Caucasus region has been gripped by violence stemming from two separatist wars in Chechnya and fueled by endemic poverty, rampant official corruption and police abuses.

In the Caspian Sea province of Dagestan, officials said Thursday that a hotel employee and another civilian were shot to death by men trying to build a bomb in their hotel room.

Republican Interior Ministry spokesman Vyacheslav Gasanov said the shooting took place late Wednesday in the capital Makhachkala. He said three armed men fled a room in the small hotel after an explosion and opened fire on a hotel clerk and another person who confronted them. He says police found several bombs and six grenades in the room.

In the Dagestani town of Khasavyurt, on the border with Chechnya, a policeman returning home from work was shot to death, Gasanov said.

MAKHACHKALA, Russia – A suicide car-bomber killed three soldiers and wounded 32 others in an attack on a military base in Russia’s violence-plagued republic of Dagestan on Sunday, officials said.

The attack took place about 1 a.m. (2100 GMT Saturday) at the base in the city of Buinaksk, said Vyacheslav Gasanov, a spokesman for the republic’s Interior Ministry.

The driver of the explosives-laden small Zhiguli automobile smashed through a gate of the base and headed for an area where soldiers are quartered in tents, Gasanov said.

But soldiers opened fire on him before he reached the center of the base. Gasanov said, the driver rammed the car into a military truck where it exploded.

After the blast, a roadside bomb hit a car taking investigators to the scene, but there were no injuries reported in that explosion.

Dagestan’s president, Magomedsalam Magomedov, visited the scene of the attack and the wounded soldiers in the hospitals where they’re being treated.

"Today’s terrorist attack indicates that militants in the republic still have the power to conduct such treacherous attacks," Magomedov was quoted as saying by Interfax news agency.

Despite "several successful" operations against the militants in the region, the country’s security services have to step up their efforts to fully stamp out the militants, he said.

Dagestan is gripped by near-daily violence between police and soldiers and insurgents believed to be inspired by separatists in neighboring Chechnya.

The attack came almost exactly 11 years after a car bomb outside an apartment building in Buinaksk housing the families of military officers killed 64 people.

The Sept. 4, 1999 attack was the first of four apartment bombings in Russia over a two-week period that killed a total of more than 290 people and that Russian officials cited as justification for launching the second war against Chechen rebels.

All the 1999 bombings were blamed on Chechen insurgents, who had recently launched an incursion into Dagestan to try to establish an Islamic state. But suspicions persist that the bombings were orchestrated by Russian officials to justify the beginning of that war. Former Federal Security Service agent Alexander Litvinenko, who was fatally poisoned with a radioactive substance in exile in Britain in 2006, co-authored a book making those allegations.

There was no claim of responsibility for Sunday’s bombings.

In Kabardino-Balkariya, another republic of the Caucasus region that includes Dagestan, a policeman was shot to death Sunday by a man whom he’d stopped for a document check, said a spokesman for the republic’s Interior Ministry, Alexander Korotkov.

VORONEZH, Russia – Hundreds of new fires broke out Sunday in Russian forests and fields that have been dried to a crisp by drought and record heat. Firefighters brought some of the wildfires raging around cities under control, getting much-needed help from residents desperate to save their homes, who shoveled sand onto the flames and carted water in large plastic bottles.

The wildfires that began threatening much of western Russia last week have killed 28 people and destroyed or damaged 77 towns or villages, the Emergencies Ministry said. Thousands of people have been evacuated from areas in the path of flames, but no deaths have been recorded since late Wednesday.

Army troops and volunteers have joined more than 22,000 firefighters in combating the fires, which blazed just outside Moscow and in several provinces east and south of the capital.

The region around Voronezh, a city of 850,000 people about 300 miles (475 kilometers) south of Moscow, has been one of the worst hit. Half of the 300 homes in the village of Maslovka were reduced to cinders.

Emergencies Ministry spokeswoman Yelena Chernova said fires in the Voronezh region were under control Sunday and no longer threatened any population centers.

But woodlands on the edge of the city, about a mile (1.5 kilometers) from some houses, continued to burn. Firefighters dumped water on the blaze from the air, while local residents pitched in on the ground.

New fires were breaking out elsewhere in Russia. Of the 774 fires burning Sunday, 369 had started in the past 24 hours. More than 300,000 acres (128,000 hectares) were ablaze, including in the regions around Nizhny Novgorod, Russia’s fifth-largest city, and the city of Ryazan, just southeast of Moscow. The fires also were intensifying in regions farther to the east such as Mordovia and Tatarstan.

Smokey air has settled over cities, already baking in the heat, and many residents complain of headaches and intestinal ailments. In Moscow, the smog has come mainly from fires in dried-up peat bogs in outlying regions. The peat, which is high in carbon, can ignite and smolder underground, giving off dangerous fumes.

Much of western and central Russia is suffering through a severe drought, thought to be the worst since 1972, in what has been the hottest summer since record-keeping began 130 years ago. This year’s harvest was already in trouble, and the fires have finished off vast fields of golden wheat and other crops.

Temperatures have topped 95 degrees (35 Celsius) for much of the past three weeks, with an all-time high of close to 100 degrees (38 Celsius) recorded in Moscow last week.

Emergency officials said the heat and drought were the main cause of the fires, but they also blamed human carelessness and urged people to use extreme caution when walking or driving in the woods or countryside.

"Any source of fire, including a cigarette thrown from a car window, will ignite the dried grass," the emergency services said in a statement.

Scores of Russians have died in the past few weeks amid a heatwave that shows no sign of breaking. Many of the dead have drowned after taking a swim – often after having drunk too much vodka. For the past two weeks temperatures across much of western Russia have soared past 35C, in the hottest and longest heatwave in decades.

Russia is also suffering what is thought to be the worst drought in more than 100 years. There has been virtually no rain since winter and crops are shrivelling.  "We’ve had 10mm of rain, scorching hot temperatures over 35C, which have just burnt all the crops up," says Colin Hinchley, a Briton who now farms in Penza near the Volga river, in southern Russia. "Winter wheat crops are 50% of the yield, and spring crops, in some cases, are going to be virtually none." A state of emergency has been imposed in 16 Russian regions, and the government is increasing loans to try to help farmers avoid bankruptcy.
"It’s a major calamity, the situation is extremely serious," said Viktor Zubkov, the first deputy prime minister responsible for agriculture. In the centre of Moscow, teams of tanker trucks roam the streets spraying water to try to stop the asphalt from melting. At lakes and rivers around Moscow groups of revellers can be seen knocking back vodka and then plunging into the water. The result is predictable – 233 people have drowned in the last week alone.  In one incident six schoolchildren drowned, because the summer camp employees looking after them were drunk. The heatwave is expected to last another week. By then Moscow may well have broken through its highest ever temperature of 36.6C.