Three police officers died Friday evening in shootings in Russia's troubled North Caucasus region, news agencies reported. Two traffic policeman died and one was injured after attackers shot at their car in Nazran, the largest city of the republic Ingushetia, the RIA Novosti news agency reported, citing investigators. 'Three inspectors in the car received serious gunshot wounds. Two of them died on the way to hospital,' a spokesman for Ingushetia's Investigative Committee told RIA Novosti. In a separate incident in the republic of Kabardino-Balkaria, two attackers shot dead the chief of a local police department and wounded another officer in the village of Nartan, investigators said. 'The acting police department chief died from his wounds and a second officer was hospitalised,' the Investigative Committee of the Prosecutors' Office said in a statement. The local pro-Kremlin authorities in Ingushetia, Kabardino-Balkaria and other North Caucasus regions are battling to defeat an Islamist insurgency that has already killed scores of civilians and police. 