A man was arrested after he allegedly strangled his estranged wife and with her body in the boot drove to the police station.
When he got there, Andrea Paltrinieri allegedly told an on-duty officer: “I killed her.
“The body is in the van outside.”
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Paltrinieri, 48, allegedly strangled mum-of-two Anna Sviridenko at his flat on Monday (10 Jun).
He then went straight to the police, where he allegedly confessed to the crime.
Officers opened the boot of his van and found Sviridenko’s body curled up in the foetal position.
A black plastic bag had been placed over her head and tied around her neck with plastic-coated wire.
A forensic pathologist was called to the scene, in Modena, north west of Bologna, Italy.
He carefully removed the bag to reveal a belt fastened around Sviridenko’s neck.
Paltrinieri was arrested on suspicion of homicide with aggravating factors and remanded into custody.
Earlier that day, Sviridenko, 40, had been granted exclusive custody of the couple’s children, aged two and three.
She was killed when she went to pick them up and take them to her home in Innsbruck, Austria.
The police believe the children were with their paternal grandparents in their flat on the second floor, above Paltrinieri’s, at the time of the killing.
Sviridenko, originally from Minsk, Belarus, worked in nuclear medicine and was training as a radiologist.
Before her death, she was splitting her time between Innsbruck and the Modena area, where her mother lives.
The police are to investigate whether she was killed while on the phone to her sister in Belarus.
She was telling her she had won the court case when the call ended abruptly, as reported on Need To Know.
Sviridenko’s friends say Paltrinieri had applied for a divorce and had repeatedly threatened to take the children away from her.
Her friend Davide Calanca told local media: “She gave everything for her children, worked incredibly hard and never rested, yet she always found time to play with them.
“Anna was as good as gold.”
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