Reuters reports:

A bomb explosion in a cafe in Russia's turbulent Chechnya region injured eight policemen and four other people on Monday night, investigators said on Tuesday.

"It was a terrorist act," said Maryam Nalayeva of the Chechen department of the Russian Prosecutor General's Investigative Committee.

"Investigators have established that a homemade explosive device went off in the cafe. We are working to determine its type," she said,

Investigators initially said that a domestic gas canister had caused the explosion.

The blast went off on Monday night in the 'Dallas' cafe in the Leninsky district of Grozny, the Chechen capital that was devastated by two separatist wars since 1994, but has been largely rebuilt over the past few years.

Russia is eager to portray Chechnya as peaceful, though clashes between local security forces and separatists continue sporadically.