Nanny waving child’s head held in Moscow

Russian police wrestled to the ground a woman in a hijab brandishing the severed head of a child outside a Moscow metro station and charged her with murder, in an incident that stirred fears of an Islamist terrorist attack.

Tue, 01 Mar, 2016 - 00:00

Andrew Osborn

The macabre episode was caught on camera by passers-by, with footage showing the unnamed woman in a black hijab wandering around in the street holding an infant’s severed head high in the air.

“I am a terrorist, I want your death,” she can be heard screaming in heavily accented Russian in a rambling tirade in which she appears to criticise democracy and talk about the end of the world.

Investigators said they thought the woman had been working as a nanny for a Moscow family and had murdered a child in her care before setting fire to the family’s flat and fleeing.

The child was three or four years old, they said.

“Given the clearly deranged behaviour of the detainee, investigators swiftly ordered her to undergo psychiatric tests to establish whether she is capable of understanding the significance of her actions,” said Moscow’s investigative committee in a statement.

News agencies cited an unnamed police source as saying the woman appeared to have been under the influence of psychotropic drugs.

Immigration authorities told media the woman was from the former Soviet republic of Uzbekistan and had been working in Moscow illegally.

One eyewitness, a reporter from the RBC.ru news portal, said she heard the woman screaming “Allahu Akbar” — an Islamic phrase meaning God is Great or Allah is Greater.

“I was on my way to the metro station from home,” said Polina Nikolskaya.

“She was standing near the metro entrance and caught my attention because she was screaming Allahu Akbar.

"I saw that she had a bloodied head in her arms, but I thought it was not real. People in the crowd said it was real.”

Lifenews.ru, an online news portal, said a policeman had first approached the woman to check her documents near Oktyabrskoye Pole metro station.

The woman had responded by removing the child’s head from a bag and shouting that she had killed the infant, it said, saying she had also threatened to blow herself up.