Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty repots:

More than a dozen people have been killed in an explosion in the Russian republic of North Ossetia that officials say was the work of a suicide car bomber.

The midday explosion took place in a busy central market in the local capital of Vladikavkaz. Grisly video footage from the site showed dead bodies lying unattended in pools of blood and frantic doctors carrying injured victims in their arms.

Officials variously put the death toll at 14 or 15. It was unclear if the bomber was included in either figure. At least 80 others were reported injured in the blast, including a number of young children.

Officials in North Ossetia and Moscow say the explosion was the result of a suicide bomber who parked a car packed with explosives near the market entrance.

The Interfax news agency quotes the North Ossetian Interior Ministry as saying the Volga car involved in the bombing had a number plate from the neighboring republic of Ingushetia.

Vladimir Markin, a spokesman for the Russian Prosecutor-General’s Office, said a terrorism investigation had been launched into the attack.

A second explosive that failed to detonate was later detected at the entrance to the market.

Prime Minister Vladimir Putin condemned the car-bomb attack. Speaking during a meeting with the chairman of Russia’s Union of Muftis, Putin said the bombing was “aimed at sowing enmity between our citizens,” and he expected Russian Muslims to make a “decisive contribution” to combating extremism.

The North Caucasus has been a growing source of concern for the Kremlin, as Islamic extremism and violent attacks continue to rise.

A suicide car-bomb attack on September 4 at a Russian Army base in Daghestan left at least five people dead, and came just days after an assassination attempt on a local Daghestan official.

Many local authorities say endemic poverty and the presence of hostile Russian security forces have contributed to the general unrest.

North Ossetia, which is predominantly Orthodox Christian, has generally seen less violence than other North Caucasus republics. But it is notorious as the site of the Beslan school siege tragedy, in which more than 330 children and adults were killed in September 2004.

North Ossetia also has its own history of bomb attacks. Alan Tskhurbayev, a former correspondent with RFE/RL’s Russian Service, spoke to RFE/RL from the scene of the blast.

“It’s necessary to say that this isn’t the first blast in the Vladikavkaz central market. It’s been the site of frequent explosions, starting in 1999, when 52 people were killed here,” Tskhurbayev said. “If memory serves, this is already the fourth blast here, or something close to it.”

Today’s market blast comes 11 years to the day after a bomb destroyed an apartment block in the Russian capital Moscow, killing 94 people.

The Kremlin blamed the blast on Chechen militants and used the incident and subsequent blasts as a pretext for initiating a second federal war in Chechnya.

Vladimir Markin, official representative of the Investigative Committee of the Prosecutor General of Russia, said that investigator Sergei Pysin has been charged with neglect of duty. If convicted, he faces up to five years in jail.

Trifonova, who suffered from diabetes and chronic kidney failure, died of heart failure in Moscow’s Matrosskaya Tishina pretrial detention facility last Friday. The businesswoman had been detained since December 2009, when she was arrested on suspicion of massive fraud. Her lawyer alleges that Trifonova was intentionally denied medical care so that she would die, immediately giving rise to comparisons in the Russian press to the case of Hermitage Capital Management lawyer Sergei Magnitsky. The lawyer died last November, also in Matrosskaya Tishina, and also allegedly due to intentionally denied medical care. Russian Federal Penitentiary Service (FSIN) officials admitted partial responsibility in that case.

After Magnitsky’s death, Russian President Dmitri Medvedev had ordered massive layoffs from FSIN. Among those, says FSIN head Aleksandr Reymer, was supposed to have been Matrosskaya Tishina manager Fikret Tagiev. The newspaper Vedomosti reported on Tuesday, however, that Tagiev remains in charge of the facility to this day. FSIN officials in Moscow did not confirm whether or not this was the case.

President Medvedev ordered a federal investigation into Trifonova’s death on Saturday. In the meantime, at least two people have been fired in connection with the incident – Deputy Manager Aleksandr Filippov at Moscow’s regional investigative agency (and one of Pysin’s supervisors) and Valery Ivarlak, who also worked at the agency.

Trifonova’s lawyer, Vladimir Zherebenkov, told the newspaper Gazeta that charging Pysin with negligence would sidestep his actual crime.

“I’m going to insist that it wasn’t negligence; there was clearly a direct intent here,” said the lawyer. In an earlier statement to the advocacy group Justice, Zherebenkov detailed how Pysin removed Trifonova from a Moscow hospital against doctors’ orders and sent her to a hospital 75 kilometers outside of Moscow that lacked the equipment she needed to survive. “I’m going to demand that he be charged with abuse; he knew perfectly well where he was sending her, and he should answer to the fullest extent,” he told Gazeta.

Zherebenkov said that he plans to have the proper documentation prepared by next Tuesday to request that Pysin be charged with abuse of his official authority – an offense punishable by up to ten years in prison.

Also on Tuesday, a group of prominent human rights advocates from the Russian Association of Independent Observers addressed a letter to President Medvedev demanding that those responsible for Trifonova’s death be brought to justice. The signatories included Lyudmila Alexeyeva, Andrei Babushkin, Valery Borshchev, Lev Ponomarev, and Aleksandr Goncharenko.

Speaking to the online news site Kasparov.ru, Borshchev lamented that “practically nothing serious was done after Magnitsky’s death. This allowed the situation to happen again.” He added that there was more blame to go around than just on Investigator Pysin. Odintsovsky City Court Judge Olga Makarova, for one, had stated publically that she wouldn’t grant Trifonova’s bail request unless she plead guilty.

The letter also includes a list of illnesses and asks the president to authorize a ban on allowing anyone suffering from them to be held in a pretrial detention facility. Right now, the list only applies to convicted criminals.