Russian police have wrestled to the ground a woman brandishing the severed head of a child outside a Moscow metro station and charged her with murder.
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, 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 three or four years old, they said.
"Given the clearly inadequate 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," 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.
Footage of the incident showed a policeman wrestling the woman to the ground before a group of colleagues helped restrain her.
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