Berlin prosecutors say suspect in slaying of migrant boy confesses to 2nd killing

BERLIN – A German man arrested in the slaying of a 4-year-old migrant boy from Bosnia has confessed to killing another child, prosecutors said Friday.

Suspect Silvio S., 32, who was apprehended Thursday in the Oct. 1 abduction of 4-year-old Mohamed Januzi, also confessed to kidnapping 6-year-old Elias Sturm in July from a playground in Potsdam, near Berlin, prosecutor Michael von Hagen told reporters.

The suspect, whose last name wasn’t released in line with German privacy laws, told authorities he had killed Mohamed a day after abducting him from the capital’s central registration centre for migrants, the Berlin prosecutor said.

After sexually assaulting the boy in an apartment in his parents’ house in the state of Brandenburg, outside Berlin, the suspect said he strangled Mohamed with a belt “to prevent the noise of his screams,” von Hagen said.

In his confession, S. also told authorities that he had killed Elias after abducting him from near his parents’ home, and buried him in a complex of garden homes in Brandenburg, Potsdam prosecutor Heinrich Junker said.

Police were searching the area for the body, but had not yet found it, Junker said.

The suspect, who worked for a Brandenburg private security company, was arrested Thursday at his family’s house in Brandenburg, near Berlin, after he was reported to police by his mother.

After he immediately confessed to killing Januzi, von Hagen said police found a boy’s body in the trunk of his car.

He had apparently kept the body in an upper floor of the house in a tub and covered it with cat litter, then moved the tub to the trunk of his car early Thursday.

“Then he drove around for what he claimed was the mundane reason that he wanted to buy a present for his cousin, who as far as I can recall had a birthday, and when he returned to his parents’ house the police were waiting for him,” von Hagen said.

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Frank Jordans contributed to this story