A double car bombing in Russia’s troubled North Caucasus killed at least 14 people and hurt more than 120 days before Vladimir Putin returns to the Kremlin, officials said yesterday.

The attacks late on Thursday outside Dagestan’s main city, which authorities said may have been by suicide bombers, shattered any illusion of stability.

They reduced cars to burned wreckage and left a crater in the ground, TV pictures showed.

The regional health ministry said 13 people died at once and another died later in a hospital.

One more person is considered missing, said a health ministry official. Another 122 people were hurt and 83 hospitalised, the emergencies ministry said.

Law enforcement agencies initially identified a suspected suicide bomber as Rizvan Aliyev, 23, a source in the regional security forces told Interfax news agency, with another believed to have been a woman.

The attacks came just days before President Dmitry Medvedev cedes the Kremlin on May 7 to President-elect Putin, who famously pledged to “wipe out (militants) in the outhouse.”

Investigators said a car laden with explosives was detonated near a traffic police checkpoint in Makhachkala at 10.10 p.m. (1810 GMT), but no one died.

The second bomb went off 15 minutes later, hitting police officers, rescue workers and passers-by, investigators said.

“We were putting out the fire in the car. We had almost extinguished it and the explosion went off,” firefighter Samed Ramazanov said in hospital.

The blasts appeared to bear hallmarks of attacks by radical militants seeking to establish an Islamist state in the Caucasus.