Rescuers fought into the early hours of Friday to find survivors in the rubble of a police station in the Caucus Republic of Chechnya after a bomb exploded, killing at least 10 police officers and injuring many others. News agencies quoted officials as saying that up to 20 other people could be buried under collapsed masonry and timber. Officials said the bomb that exploded on Thursday night in the four-story building in the regional capital Grozny had been deliberately planted to hit a gathering of police officials on a floor above.

"This terrorist act was carried out to intimidate Chechens who work for the police and those who are about to join the police," Bislan Gantamirov, Chechnya's first deputy prime minister, told Itar-Tass news agency.

The nationalist Chechen attack mocked Kremlin claims that the Russian military was gradually asserting control over the security situation in Chechnya where Moscow has been battling nationalist fighters on and off for eight years.

And the incident seemed certain to cast a shadow over Russian President Vladimir Putin's talks on Iraq later on Friday with British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

Although Moscow says the military phase of the war in Chechnya is over, it has failed to produce a long-term political solution to the conflict, which continues to claim lives daily among Russian forces and Chechnya civilians.

PLANTED BY 'MOLES'

Chechnya prosecutor Nikolai Kostyuchenko told Tass the bomb had been brought into Zavodsky district police station by "moles" working within the police force on behalf of Chechen nationalist fighters.

It was planted on the second floor and detonated underneath a meeting, one floor above, of police officers reviewing the security situation at the end of their day.

"The fighters are trying to intimidate all Chechens who have stood up on behalf of law and order and constitutional authority," Kostyuchenko said.

"The explosion was premeditated. Somebody from the building itself carried in an explosive device," Supyan Makhchayev, Grozny deputy mayor, told Russian first channel television.

News agencies issued varied estimates of the casualty toll.

Apart from those dead, nine of whom had been pulled from fallen masonry, another eight had been taken to hospital with serious injuries.

Television footage showed rescue workers, including local people equipped with shovel and axes, hacking at debris in a search for more possible survivors. A badly-bloodied victim was shown being carried by stretcher into an ambulance.

Officials were quoted as saying the rescue operation would continue throughout the night. "An accurate figure for the victims of this tragedy will be known only in the morning," a regional government official quoted by RIA Novosti said.

PHOTO CAPTION

At least 10 people were killed on October 10, 2002 when an explosion tore through a police station in Grozny, war-ravaged capital of the Caucus Republic of Chechnya region, Russian news agencies said. The explosion, which one city official said was almost certainly caused by a bomb, reduced the four-story building in the city's Zavodsky district to rubble and agencies said several other people were trapped in the debris. (Reuters Graph