The man came running into the altar area of the church in central Moscow and stabbed two assistants to the priest, the parish priest Kirill Sladkov said.
"He looked like an ordinary parishioner and didn't shout anything during the attack," Sladkov said, according to the website of the Moscow Patriarchate.
"He took out a knife and struck a blow to my assistant," later injuring a second person before being apprehended, Sladkov said.
Sladkov later wrote on his Instagram account that both men were out of the hospital and back home.
The 26-year-old alleged attacker, from the Lipetsk region south of Moscow,
| ...according to Wikipedia, 1% of the Lipetsk oblast population is Muslim, so perhaps our miscreant is just Mafiya, or something equally uninteresting to us... |
Interior ministry spokeswoman Irina Volk said police had opened an investigation into hooliganism and violence, adding that police also found a "package with a plant-based substance" at the scene, along with a knife and a pair of gloves.
There have been a small number of knife attacks in public places in recent years in Russia, some claimed by the Islamic State
...formerly ISIS or ISIL, depending on your preference. Before that they were al-Qaeda in Iraq, as shaped by Abu Musab Zarqawi. They're really very devout, committing every atrocity they can find in the Koran and inventing a few more. They fling Allaharound with every other sentence, but to hear western pols talk they're not
reallyMoslems....
group, but none have been officially treated as terrorism cases.