Woman, with child’s severed head, held in Moscow
Print Edition
RUSSIAN police wrestled to the ground a woman in a hijab brandishing the severed head of a child outside a Moscow metro station yesterday and charged her with murder, in an incident that stirred fears of an Islamist terrorist attack.
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 criticize democracy and talk about the end of the world.
Investigators said they thought the woman, who they said was from a Central Asian country, 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 3 or 4 years old, they said.
“Given the clearly inadequate behavior of the detainee, investigators swiftly ordered her to undergo psychiatric tests to establish whether she is capable of understanding the significance of her actions,” Moscow’s investigative committee said in a statement.
Russian news agencies cited an unnamed police source as saying the woman appeared to have been under the influence of psychotropic drugs.
With frequent warnings from government officials about the danger that Islamic State militants pose to Russia and a long history of terrorist attacks in Moscow, some onlookers thought they were witnessing an act of terror.
One eyewitness, a reporter from the RBC.ru news portal, said she heard the woman screaming “Allahu Akbar” (Islamic phrase meaning God is Great or Allah is Greater). “I was on my way to the metro station from home,” Polina Nikolskaya, the reporter, said. “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.”
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