German police arrest Italian fugitive accused of kidnapping and murdering his ex-girlfriend

THE German police arrested a 22-year-old Italian student this Sunday, November 19, who had been on the run for more than a week.

Filippo Turetta allegedly kidnapped and murdered his 22-year-old ex-girlfriend whose body was reportedly discovered in a gully near Lake Barcis yesterday. Giulia Cecchettin’s head and neck was said to have stab wounds.

According to Emanuele Compagno, the detainee’s lawyer, Turetta was found in his car near the city of Leipzig at around 10 pm on Saturday.

He allegedly ran out of petrol on the A9 motorway and left the vehicle on the emergency lane with its lights turned off, resulting in the traffic police locating him, reported Ansa.

When did they first go missing?

Turetta and Compagno originally disappeared after his former University of Padua student girlfriend was scheduled to receive her biomedical engineering degree.

Speaking about the arrest, the Italian Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani said that the suspect would be ‘back in Italy within 48 hours to answer for his actions’, according to Ansa.

After the two went missing, their trail was eventually picked up on November 11 when surveillance cameras captured them driving away in his black Fiat Punto.

An international arrest warrant for murder was issued by the Venice Prosecutor’s Office after the body was found. A judge had already validated Turetta’s arrest, in a hearing that took place this afternoon, with the suspect subsequently transferred ‘to a Halle detention centre’, a spokesperson from Halle an der Saale police, in Saxony Anhalt, told Ansa.

‘We are still in shock from what he did. We don’t understand how something like this could have happened and we can’t understand how a boy to whom we gave everything could have done something like this. It’s not conceivable, there must be something that got into him’, Filippo’s mother Nicola told the aforementioned news outlet.

She added: ‘We offer our deepest condolences to her family, we loved Giulia and no one will ever bring her back’.