MOSCOW (Reuters) - Police killed two suspected Islamic militants on Thursday after one of them threw a grenade at a group of officers and two others died in a separate shootout in Russia's volatile North Caucasus region, Interfax reported. Both incidents took place in Dagestan province, which has become the epicenter of violence for militants seeking to establish an Islamic state in the North Caucasus, near where Russia plans to hold the 2014 Winter Olympics.

Moscow, May 20 (EFE).- The death toll from the car-bomb attacks Monday in Makhachkala, the capital of the Russian federal republic of Dagestan, has been revised downward to three, with more than a dozen people wounded, officials said. "According to preliminary figures, three people died - a police officer, an operations officer and a marshal. More than 10 people were wounded," the official Dagestan Interior Ministry spokesman said. The government initially told the Interfax news agency that at least eight people were killed when the two car bombs exploded.

MAKHACHKALA, Russia (Reuters) - Two car bombs killed at least three people and wounded dozens of others on Monday in Dagestan, a turbulent province in Russia's North Caucasus region where armed groups are waging an Islamist insurgency. Car bombs, suicide bombings and firefights are common in Dagestan, at the center of an insurgency rooted in two post-Soviet wars against separatist rebels in neighboring Chechnya.

Thirty-eight people, mostly psychiatric patients, were killed Friday in a fire that ravaged a hospital in the Moscow region, with the victims engulfed by flames as they slept behind barred windows. The deadly nighttime blaze raised new questions about security standards at Russia's medical institutions, in particular psychiatric hospitals, after a string of fires in the last years. The fire broke out on the roof and spread rapidly throughout the hospital wing in the small town of Ramensky around 40 kilometres (25 miles) outside Moscow, the health ministry said.