A Russian wrestler faces jail after kicking a statue of Buddha in the face, urinating on it and broadcasting the whole episode live on the Periscope app.

Said Osmanov, 22, from Dagestan, appeared to urinate on the statue, in Russia’s largely Buddhist region of Kalmykia, in the country’s south-west, before aiming a high-kick at its face.

The incident happened over the weekend in Elista, the capital of Kalmykia. A group of wrestlers from Dagestan, a neighbouring mainly Muslim region, were in town for a tournament and on a tour of the city in the evening.

During a walk around the town, Osmanov committed the sacrilegious acts at a Buddhist temple. As word spread on social media, an angry crowd descended on the hotel where the wrestlers were staying, forced Osmanov on to the street and demanded he apologise on his knees for his actions. Police later arrived and took the wrestler into custody.

Monks at Elista’s main Buddhist temple said on Tuesday they planned a ritual cleansing ceremony for the Buddha statue that had been violated by Osmanov’s actions.

In an attempt to prevent an ethnic conflict erupting, Dagestani officials have flown to Kalmykia and made statements condemning the act, while Osmanov, who remains in custody,could be charged with hooliganism motivated by religious hatred, the same charge that saw members of the punk group Pussy Riot sentenced to two years in jail for carrying out a “punk prayer” in Moscow’s main cathedral.

Dagestan’s leader, Ramazan Abdulatipov, said he had reprimanded the region’s sports minister and would be carrying out educational work all sports groups in the region.

Kalmykia is a land of arid steppe on the shores of the Caspian Sea in southern Russia. Its inhabitants, the Kalmyks, are descendants of Genghis Khan’s Mongols and practise Buddhism.

The region was run for many years by Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, an eccentric businessman who also runs Fide, the world chess organisation. He was replaced as Kalmyk leader in 2010 and stepped down temporarily from Fide leadership after being placed on a US sanctions list for links to the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, in December.

Ilyumzhinov, who claimed to have been abducted by aliens during the 1990s, was so obsessed with chess that he ordered the construction of a “chess city” on the outskirts of Elista. He also presided over a Buddhist revival in the region, after the religion had been suppressed during the Soviet period. The Dalai Lama visited Kalmykia in 1992.