Loud sound during anti-terror drill in Dagestan mistaken for blast

An alarm that sounded Tuesday as part of an anti-terror exercise was mistaken for an explosion in Russia's violent Dagestan region.

Marina Rasulova, a police spokeswoman in the regional capital, Makhachkala, initially said an explosive device went off on the outskirts of the city, causing no injuries or damage.

But regional Interior Ministry spokesman Abdul Manap Musayev later said what sounded like an explosion was an alarm signal that was part of a police anti-terror exercise, the AP reports.

An ethnically mixed, mostly Muslim region adjacent to Chechnya in southern Russia, Dagestan has been hit by frequent bombings and other attacks in the past year, most of them targeting police and other law enforcement authorities.