BELARUS: At least 40 people have been hurt in the second bomb attack this month in Belarus, where President Alexander Lukashenko is wary of dissent against his authoritarian rule.
The blast ripped through a busy café in the town of Vitebsk, birthplace of the artist Marc Chagall, hurling shrapnel into the crowd and seriously injuring four people.
Local police said the explosion was caused by a beer can packed with shards of metal, but blamed "hooliganism" rather than any terror group or dissidents for the attack, which came eight days after a similar incident in the town injured two people.
The attack also bore the hallmarks of the kind of mafia "turf war" over bars and clubs that regularly flares up in other former Soviet republics.
Mr Lukashenko, whom the United States calls the last dictator in Europe, prides himself on the low level of official crime in Belarus, a country of 10 million which he has led into diplomatic isolation from the West.
He has systematically crushed most political opponents and critical media, while concentrating power in his own hands and those of his allies.
His security services - still called the KGB - are on guard for unrest ahead of next year's planned elections, which Mr Lukashenko's opponents and western governments have targeted as a chance to oust him.
He has accused Washington and the EU of fomenting in Belarus the kind of revolution that recently unseated Kremlin-friendly regimes in Ukraine and Georgia.
But he vowed yesterday to prevent any weakening of security in Belarus, and urged his countrymen to play their part in protecting the country.
