A police officer and a soldier have been killed by gunmen in Russia's restive southern province of Dagestan, officials said Saturday. The police officer was attacked by gunmen late Friday in the town of Khasavyurt and died of wounds on the way to a hospital, said Vyacheslav Gasanov, a spokesman for the Interior Ministry's regional office. In a separate attack early Saturday a group of gunmen detonated an explosive device near a railway and ambushed a group of soldiers that responded to the incident, the ministry said. One soldier was wounded and later died in a hospital. Dagestan and other provinces in Russia's North Caucasus have seen near-daily attacks on police and other authorities by groups linked to an Islamic insurgency that has spread across the region after two separatist wars in Chechnya. Long-running tensions between different ethnic groups sometimes exploded into open conflicts in other areas of the south. Eight people were hospitalized with gunshot wounds and other injuries following a street clash late Friday in the town of Zelenokumsk of the Stavropol region. Local police said that the conflict erupted after a woman told a group of local men that several ethnic Chechens tried to abduct her. Dozens of local residents then clashed with a group of several Chechens before police interfered. Police later arrested four ethnic Chechens on charges of inflicting injuries to several people, said Alexander Noskov, a spokesman for the Stavropol region police. 