A woman has been detained in Moscow after brandishing a severed child’s head at police and allegedly shouting “Allahu Akbar”.

The woman, who has been named locally as Gyulchekhra Bobokulova – a 39-year-old native of Uzbekistan – was working as a nanny, with some reports suggesting she was “drugged” as she held the head in her hands.

The victim is believed to be a four-year-old child she was looking after. She had also been caring for another child, but the parents had taken that child away before the incident.

Russia’s Interior Ministry said in a statement that police had discovered the headless body of a child at the scene of a fire in an apartment block near the metro station, Oktyabrskoye Polye, where the woman was detained. They believe the woman started to fire to conceal the crime.

Video footage shows the woman wondering around outside the metro station, shouting and holding the head in the air.

Yulia Ivanova, a spokeswoman for Moscow’s Interior Ministry, said the suspect “had waited until the parents left with the older child, and for unknown reasons committed murder of the child, set the apartment on fire and left the scene of the crime.”

Authorities are not treating the incident as terror-related, despite the woman reportedly shouting “Allahu Akbar” and “I am a terrorist”.