Police have detained a nanny on suspicion of murder after she was found at a Moscow metro station holding the severed head of a child.

The woman, believed to be from central Asia, can be seen in video footage holding up what appears to be a severed head near Oktyabrskoye Pole station in north-western Moscow.

In the video she is covered in black except for her face and she can be heard shouting “for a terrorist, for your death”. She had also yelled “Allahu Akbar”, RBC newspaper reported.

Investigators said the body of a three- or four-year-old girl had been discovered in a burnt-out flat nearby.



“Having waited for the parents to leave the flat with their older child, she killed the child for unknown reasons, set the flat on fire and fled,” the investigative committee said.

A bomb squad from the FSB security agency was working in the area where the woman was detained, Interfax news agency reported.

LifeNews, a tabloid news site known for its close ties to law enforcement, reported that the parents told police the victim was a four-year-old girl named Nastya. The Moskovsky Komsomolets newspaper quoted a law enforcement source as saying that the nanny was Gyulchekhra Bobokulova, 38, from Uzbekistan.

Police approached the woman at the entrance to the metro to check her documents, after which she took the severed head out of her bag and began yelling that she would blow herself up, according to LifeNews. She was found to not have any explosives. Bobokulova later told police she had been upset over problems with her husband, the site also reported.

“There was a lot of people, they were running and yelling ‘terrorist attack,’” Alyona Kuratova, who witnessed the woman with the severed head, told independent channel TV Rain.

Fears of terrorist attacks have been running high since several Islamic extremist groups began threatening Russia over President Vladimir Putin’s bombing campaign targeting groups fighting the Syrian government. In October, a bomb brought down an A321 passenger plane over Egypt that was carrying mainly Russian tourists, killing 224 people.

Also in October, law enforcement detained up to 20 supporters of the Islamic group Hizb ut-Tahrir. The FSB said it had found an ammonium nitrate explosive device in one flat and that some suspects had trained with Islamic State. This month, the FSB said it had discovered an explosives laboratory and detained seven people in Yekaterinburg on suspicion of plotting terrorist attacks in Moscow, St Petersburg and the Ural region.