This is the moment a ‘monster’ confesses to seeking to kill a helpless boy, one, who had fled the conflict between Israel and Iran.
Appalling footage showed the Belarus man, 31, a nuclear power plant construction worker, pick up and hurl the child on the ground of the arrivals hall of a Moscow airport.
The child had arrived in Russia minutes earlier after he and his mother fled the bombing in Iran, say reports.
Little Yazdan, aged 18 months, is now fighting for his life with serious skull fractures and spinal injuries.
The man, Vladimir Vitkov, was reported by some outlets to have been on the same flight as the child and his mother who were escaping from war-ravaged Iran where they had been visiting relatives.
They had reached Afghanistan after fleeing Iran.
Earlier, Vitkov had been fired from a nuclear power plant construction job in Egypt after failing a spot check for drugs and alcohol, and was returning home via Moscow, according to a friend.
‘He was valued there, appointed a foreman,’ the friend told Daily Storm.
‘But there are constant checks, you have to blow into a pipe before work.
‘Apparently, he drank or smoked something there – and because of that he was sent home.
‘He was at the airport because he was returning from work in Egypt.’
The boy was thrown head first on the ground by the stranger, who was reported by Russian law enforcement to have been high on drugs.
He ‘confessed’ when a police interrogator asked: ‘Explain what you did.
‘I attempted to murder a child.’
‘Where did this happen?’
‘At Sheremetyevo Airport [in Moscow].’
‘What was your motive?
‘My motive? I don’t know – I was under the influence of drugs.’
Reports said cannabis had been found in his possession and there were traces of the drug in his blood.
Mash news outlet reported today that he had drunk three bottles of whisky and obtained cannabis in Cairo before the incident.
The Moscow region children’s ombudswoman Ksenia Mishonova labelled him a ‘drug-addled monster’, and called for him to be punished with ‘hard labour until he is feeble with old age’.
‘I am always very, very careful, but here I no longer have the strength not to say simply – [this was] a stoned drug addict, a monster,’ she said after seeing the boy in hospital.
‘I cannot call this person anything else.
‘I believe that he is not sick at all.
‘In our country, drug addiction is like a disease — it is not a disease, but this is my position.
‘He is an absolute monster, a criminal who should be judged in the most severe manner for what he did….
‘God simply saved the boy
‘In any other situation, a slightly different tilt of the head, and he, of course, would not have survived.’
By a ‘miracle’ the child’s brain was not damaged, she said, adding that he was now out of a medically-induced coma as doctors assessed his condition.
The boy’s distraught mother Hajizada Sahar had repeatedly asked her if her son would recover, she said.
Dr Tatyana Shapovalenko, chief doctor at the Roshal Children’s Centre, Moscow, said:
‘The child was admitted with a severe craniocerebral injury.
‘He has an open fracture of the skull bones, a fracture of the base and vault of the skull, a subdural haematoma.’
She said he did not require neurosurgical treatment.
Vitkov is pictured with wife Olesya and his daughter, around the same age as the boy he attacked.
The family lives in the Gomel region of Belarus.