MOSCOW: The president of Ingushetia, who is recovering from an attempt on his life, accused on Monday the United States, Britain and Israel of seeking to destabilize the situation in the North Caucasus.

A powerful bomb blast rocked the center of Nazran, Ingushetia’s largest city, leaving 19 dead and about 80 others injured on Monday morning.

“I am miles from believing that Arabs are behind this. There are other, more serious forces there….We understand whose interests these are: the United States, Britain, and Israel too,” President Yunus-Bek Yevkurov said in an interview with the Russian News Service (RSN) radio.

“The West will keep seeking to prevent Russia from reviving the former Soviet might,” he added.

Yevkurov was discharged from a top Moscow clinic last week and is due to return home by the end of August after a rehabilitation course. He underwent a series of operations after sustaining head and internal injuries when a car bomb exploded as his motorcade passed by on June 22.

The Ingush president said that as part of his work he had constructed scenarios that could lead to a new war in Russia’s North Caucasus and had concluded it would not happen.

“There could be a third Chechen war, and a fourth. But there won’t be. It will be stable. It will be fine,” Yevkurov said.

However, he warned that there could be wars if “blood-thirsty” radicals come to power in the Caucasus.