An Austrian man with a violent criminal past has admitted to killing a woman, dumping her body in a lake and keeping one body part for "tasting," a prosecution spokeswoman said Wednesday.
The case came to light in mid-April when a fisherman found the woman's torso floating in Lake Neusiedl near Rust, a town east of Vienna.
The suspect told police that he killed the woman in the heat of an argument in his flat and cut up her body for disposal in late March, less than two years after he was released on probation from an institution for mentally disturbed convicts.
The man, who was born in 1955, had a violent and sexual criminal history, prosecution spokeswoman Verena Strnad told a press conference in Eisenstadt.
Police are still trying to identify the woman, who was between 25 and 30 years old. Police investigator Harald Brenner said he could not rule out that she was from Slovakia.
Investigators said the man got to know the woman near Vienna's Westbahnof train station, and that she possibly did not give him her real first name.
"He cut her up into several parts and dumped them in the bay" of the lake, Strnad said.
After the parts were discovered, investigators found one fishing hut in the lake was owned by a previous convict. His apartment did not only contain DNA traces of the victim, but a cut-up body part in the freezer.
"He said he had considered tasting it at a later point in time," Strnad said.
