Italian prosecutors said on Monday that a suspect has confessed to murdering a 33-year-old man Stefano Leo in Turin in February.
The suspect said he killed Leo because he looked happy.
The suspect, Said Machaouat, a 27-year-old Italian with Moroccan roots, turned himself in at the weekend.
“I chose to kill that young man because he looked happy. And I couldn’t stand his happiness,” Machaouat said, according to the prosecutors.
Machaouat was quoted as telling prosecutors Ciro Santoriello and Enzo Bucarelli that “I wanted to kill a lad like me, to take away all his prospects, his children, his friends and relatives”.
The suspect, who showed investigators to where a kitchen knife that is thought to have been the murder weapon was, said he was depressed after splitting up with his ex-wife.
“The worst thing was knowing that my four-year-old boy was calling a friend of my ex-partner daddy,” Machaouat was quoted as saying.
The suspect explained that he had been waiting at least twenty minutes that Saturday, February 23, watching the faces of the passers-by, and then he saw Leo with the happiness that seem unbearable to him, he then cut his throat from behind.
Mechaout had married very young and had a criminal record for family maltreatment. In 2012 he had a son with a woman from Turin, who had left him in 2015: from there a period of depression started for him.
