The nanny accused of beheading a four-year-old girl in her charge in Moscow has said that she committed the murder in revenge for President Putin carrying out an aerial bombing campaign against Muslims.
Speaking in a video that was uploaded to YouTube, Gyulchekhra Bobokulova said: “I took revenge on the one who was spilling blood.”
Asked whom she meant, she replied in broken Russian: “Putin. Bombs with a plane. Why are you bombing Muslims and no one says anything about it? They also want to live.”
Ms Bobokulova, 38, from Uzbekistan, appeared to be referring to Russia’s campaign of airstrikes against targets in Syria. Police arrested her on Monday when she walked up to the Oktyabrskoye Pole metro station in northwest Moscow brandishing the child’s head and shouting “Allahu akbar” and “I am a terrorist”.
The circumstances in which the video was recorded were not clear. Ms Bobukulova was sitting on a wooden chair that could have been in part of the court where she was remanded in custody on Wednesday, and was wearing the same clothes she wore in the dock.
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Her interviewer asked her leading questions about her Muslim faith and whether she wanted to go and live in Syria. She replied: “I wanted to live there. I read the Koran, I read prayers day and night, I cry to God. I am a strong believer. I wanted to go to a Muslim city, cover my face and live there.”
Bakhretdin Turayev, her father, told a Russian website that she had been treated in a psychiatric hospital in 2002 after hearing voices and “seeing blood”.