MAKHACHKALA, Russia (AP) - Flags flew at half-staff and all entertainment programming was canceled on TV and radio Friday in the southern Russian republic of Dagestan, where the death toll in a Victory Day bomb blast rose to 39.
The regional legislature declared a day of mourning for the victims the bomb that exploded in the Caspian Sea port of Kaspiisk along the route of a parade marking the holiday commemorating the allied victory over Nazi Germany - the Russian army's most important celebration.
At the site of the blast, mourners placed flowers along the roadside and lit dozens of candles in memory of the victims.
Three people injured in the blast died in the hospital overnight, officials said, including two servicemen, bringing he number of servicemen killed to 20, most of them musicians marching in the a parade, a spokesman for the regional Interior Ministry said.
The dead also included at least 13 children and five adults. One unidentified victim died in the hospital overnight, the ITAR-Tass news agency reported, quoting Dagestan's Deputy Public Health Minister Dzhamalutdin Gasayev.
Witnesses said the remote-control bomb was an anti-personnel mine packed with metal fragments. It ripped through the crowd as the parade marched toward the city's cemetery, leaving mangled bodies and musical instruments scattered on the bloodied street.
No one claimed responsibility for the blast, but regional prosecutors said Islamic militants who have organized previous attacks in the restive region were probably to blame.
A 1996 blast in a Kaspiisk apartment building housing Russian border guards and their families killed 68 people. Officials never determined who was responsible.
Thursday's explosion was the latest in a series of terrorist and criminal attacks in Dagestan, but it timing on Victory Day increased the sense of shock and anger across the nation.
President Vladimir Putin met in the Kremlin Friday with the prime minister, defense minister, foreign minister and the interior minister to discuss assistance to survivors and families of those killed, press secretary Alexei Gromov told the Interfax news agency.
Nikolai Patrushev, head of the Federal Security Service, reported to Putin from Kaspiisk by telephone to inform him on the progress of the investigation into the shooting.
Putin appointed Patruhev on Thursday to oversee the investigation into the blast, which he called a terrorist act. "We have the right to view (the perpetrators) as we view Nazis, as those whose purpose is to sow terror and kill," Putin said Thursday.
Dagestan borders the breakaway republic of Chechnya, where rebels fired on a stadium in the capital Grozny on Thursday as Russian forces and Chechen civilians gathered for Victory Day celebrations. Four police officers were wounded, according to an official in Chechnya's Moscow-backed administration.
Prosecutors said they believed the Kaspiisk bombing was staged by Islamic militants based in the region, members of the strict Wahhabi branch of Islam - not necessarily Chechen rebels. Dagestan, a patchwork of mostly Muslim ethnic minorities, is the site of fairly frequent small-scale bombings and other unrest, often spillover violence from Chechnya.
Chechnya won de facto independence after a 1994-6 war between separatists and Russian troops. Russian forces returned in 1999 after Chechnya-based rebels invaded Dagestan and a series of apartment house bombings in Moscow and other Russian cities left killed about 300 people. Russian authorities blamed the bombings on the rebels.