Woman held after carrying child’s severed head in Moscow

A woman who carried the severed head of a child into a Moscow metro station has been arrested, the city’s prosecutor’s office said.

Moscow investigators said in a statement the unnamed nanny was from Central Asia and that she was undergoing psychiatric testing to see if she was mentally sound and understood the significance of the crime they said she had committed.

The woman was seen carrying the head near Oktyabrskoye Pole metro station in the Russian capital this monrning.

In scenes captured on dramatic CCTV footage around half a dozen officers swooped outside the station and dragged her to the ground.

In a statement originally in Russian, authorities said the woman was the child’s nanny.

The child’s mother was taken to hospital in an unconscious condition after she learned of the news, according to reports.

She is suspected of killing the child when it was in her care, officials said. A graphic video of the incident has appeared on social media and shows the woman walking back and forth while pointing in the air, holding an object in her other hand.

Passers-by said it was hard to determine if it was a man or a woman.

Investigators claim that the baby sitter waited until the parents of an older child had left the apartment before murdering the child and starting a fire. “Monstrous and inexplicable. The suspect in the murder of the child was detained due to vigilant policeman near the Oktyabrskoye Pole metro [station]”, Astakhov wrote on his Twitter. The child was about three or four years old, Interfax reported, citing sources.