Russian bus bomb kills 8, wounds 50

A bomb ripped through a bus at rush hour in the southern Russian city of Tolyatti yesterday, killing eight people and wounding 50, prosecutors said.
Provincial governor Vladimir Artyakov said he had opened a terrorism investigation after the powerful explosion, which struck residents heading to work early in the morning at a busy road junction in the centre of Tolyatti.
Fragments of glass and metal scattered far from the green bus and the shock wave blew out the windows of a nearby residential building, the RIA Novosti news agency quoted rescue official Andrei Derbenev as saying.
A prosecutor's spokesman, Vladimir Markin, confirmed on national television that eight people had been killed and 50 injured.
A medical source in the city, quoted by Interfax, said that three children were among the hospitalised. Several of the injured were suffering from burns.
A spokesman for Artyakov, who was visiting the injured in hospital, said the blast had caused shock among residents of the city who were not used to such attacks.
"There hasn't been anything of this sort in Samara province before, no explosion of a bus," the spokesman, Ivan Skrylnik, told AFP.
It was the second blast on a bus in Russia in just over a week, following an explosion that killed one person and wounded five in the turbulent province of Dagestan on October 23.