A killer who was given the all-clear from a psychiatric hospital decapitated an 18 month old relative with a knife and brandished the severed head in the streets of a Russian city, say eyewitnesses.

Mikhail Elinsky, 42, also stabbed his niece, the dead girl’s mother, resulting in serious abdominal injuries.

He was eventually shot by police after a video shows him repeatedly taunting officers with a knife and refusing to give himself up.

The wounded knifeman was taken to a hospital in the city of Astrakhan, where he later died.

The man’s niece Tatiana had earlier pleaded with the authorities not to release him from psychiatric hospital, fearing he remained a danger after he had killed a woman six years ago.

She desperately tried to save her daughter Natalia but was stabbed as she came close to the kitchen where Elinsky was butchering the child.

Eyewitness Anastasiya Miloserdova said:

“The little girl was his niece, and his mother had begged not to let him out of the mental clinic.

“And look how it ended he ran around the area with the cut off head of the little one.”

Tatiana said:

“We were about to go out, and my daughter was sitting on her tricycle.

“He pulled her off, grabbed her and took her to the kitchen.

“He closed the door and began to cut her.

“I tried to stop him and ran to the kitchen but he stabbed me in the stomach with his knife.”

Her husband Igor was too grief-stricken to speak. A local report said the man “ran around the street holding up her head…

“It took police half an hour to detain the man. He was taken to the hospital with three gun wounds.”

Law enforcement have confirmed the knifeman killed the child, wounded the mother and that he died of gun shot wounds in hospital.

Six years ago, the knifeman had killed a female shop assistant in the same city, repeatedly stabbing her with a knife in a drunken rage.

He was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and sent by a judge to a high security hospital for treatment.

The man was released recently as “healthy”, it was reported.

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