MOSCOW, June 23 (RIA Novosti) - The president of Russia's volatile southern republic of Ingushetia remains in a serious condition after injuries sustained in an assassination attempt, a surgeon treating him said.
Yunus-bek Yevkurov's motorcade was hit by a suspected suicide car bomb on Monday near the city of Nazran. He was airlifted to Moscow after an emergency operation.
"Yevkurov is in a serious condition and remains unconscious in respiratory care," Professor Vladimir Fyodorov told Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, who visited the Ingush leader at the Vishnyovski Institute of Surgery.
Medvedev said he hoped the doctors would be able to bring Yevkurov back to good health.
"We need Yunus-bek Yevkurov," he said. "He is a real officer who has started to truly change the situation in Ingushetia."
The president earlier ordered the federal Interior Ministry and the FSB security service to carry out an investigation into the blast, and has also sent his envoy to the region.
Medvedev called the blast as a terrorist attack linked to Yevkoyev's efforts to end a spiral of violence and corruption in the republic.
Yevkurov, a former military intelligence official, became president of the republic last October. In a recent RIA Novosti interview, he said he would offer an amnesty to remaining militants, but pledged to "eliminate" those who would not lay down their weapons.
Ingushetia, which borders on Chechnya, continues to see frequent militant attacks on officials and police.
Russia's North Caucasus republics have been swept by a wave of violence recently, two months after the government formally ended its decade-long counterterrorism operation in Chechnya, which witnessed two brutal separatist wars in the 1990s and early 2000s.
