“People were lying on the ground, screaming and calling for help,” witness Alexander Koblyakov told Rossiya-24 TV. “I helped carry out a police officer whose head and face were covered in blood. He couldn’t speak.”
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Officials said about 50 additional victims were injured by the bombing in the city formerly known as Leningrad.
The attack, which happened at about 1 p.m. local time (4 a.m. ET), heightens concern about terrorism ahead of February’s Olympics in the Black Sea resort of Sochi, and following similar bombings.
On Friday, a car bomb killed three people in the southern Russian city of Pyatigorsk, 170 miles east of Sochi. In October, another female suicide bomber was blamed for a bus explosion in Volgograd that killed five people.
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