BRUSSELS: A man in his mid-30s in Belgium has confessed to killing his mother and sticking parts of her body in a refrigerator found in a canal in the West European country's east, prosecutors said on Friday.
The refrigerator with its grisly contents — two arms and two legs — was found on Tuesday bobbing in a canal on the outskirts of the eastern city of Liege, triggering a murder investigation.
That led detectives to discover the rest of the woman's body — her head and torso — in a trash container thrown in a nearby river.
A tattoo on the torso helped identify the victim as a woman in her 70s, a spokesman for the Liege prosecutors' office told Agence France-Presse (AFP).
Her son, born in 1988, was arrested just before dawn in a hotel close to Brussels' airport on Thursday.
He was apparently preparing to fly to South Korea, spokesman Catherine Collignon said.
Under questioning by police, the man 'confessed,' she added, and the investigating judge ordered him charged and taken into custody.
Early indications in the investigation suggest the mother and son had regular arguments after he moved back in with her after the coronavirus pandemic began.
The killing was said to have occurred in Seraing, a southwestern neighborhood of Liege, where the woman lived with her two children and a grandchild, local media reported.
The suspect was said to have confessed to the killing to someone in his entourage, who shared the information with another person, who spoke to police.