Two roadside explosions in Ingushetia region near Chechnya injured a police officer on Saturday, and a separate blast hit a regional gas pipeline, officials and media said.

Two makeshift roadside bombs went off in the Ingush city of Malgobek when the police officer was driving to work in his car, a local interior ministry spokesman said.

Another bomb exploded near a gas pipeline on Ingushetia's border with the southern Russian region of North Ossetia, Interfax news agency quoted regional sources as saying.

No other details on the pipeline were immediately available.

The latest blasts occurred less than a month after Ingushetia's Prime Minister Ibrahim Malsagov survived an assassination attempt.

PHOTO CAPTION

Russian experts investigate the car of Ingushetia's Prime Minister Ibrahim Malsagov at the site of a bomb blast in the centre of southern region's key town of Nazran, August 25, 2005. (Reuters)