A bomb has exploded beneath
a high-ranking police official's car in Russia's volatile North Caucasus province of Ingushetia, injuring his driver, state news has said.

The ITAR-Tass news agency said that Beslan Shadiyev, a deputy interior minister in the province, was not in the car at the time of the blast on Monday.

The bomb went off when Shadiyev's car was parked in the local interior ministry car park in Ingushetia's largest city of Nazran.

The pro-Russian authorities in Ingushetia, like other mainly Muslim regions of Russia's Northern Caucasus, has been seeking to quell an Islamist separatist movement over the past years, which has claimed scores of lives.

Troubled region

At least two police officers were killed in Ingushetia on April 5, after a suicide bomb went off near a police headquarters there.

Less than an hour after the attack, a second bomb in a car opposite the police station was detonated, wounding an investigator from the local prosecutor's office.

The attacks came as Russian authorities continued their hunt for those responsible for twin suicide attacks on Russia's Moscow metro on March 29, that killed 40 people.

The so-called Caucasus Emirate, an Islamist group led by Doku Umarov, a Chechen anti-government commander, claimed responsibility for the metro attacks.

Those attacks were followed by suicide bombings in the Dagestan region of the North Caucasus that killed 12 people, including a local police chief.