Man confesses to killing and then raping his niece

A 15-year-old girl in Italy was strangled to death and then raped by her uncle before he threw the corpse into a well to hide the crime, media reports said.

Michele Misseri admitted to killing his niece Sarah Scazzi 41 days after she disappeared in the Puglia region.

Misseri, 53, on Wednesday broke down during a 15-hour interrogation and confessed to killing his niece who went missing on August 26. An autopsy on her 'unrecognisable' decomposed body showed signs of rape after her death, according to investigators in the city of Taranto.

"I strangled her with a cord while I was behind her and I raped her after she was dead," he told investigators, according to unnamed sources close to the probe, who said the crime occurred in Misseri's garage.

Misseri has been detained for kidnapping, murder and concealment of a body.

"This person confessed to killing the girl and he told us where to find her," said Taranto investigator Franco Sebastio, during a press conference on Thursday.

The victim's mother Concetta Serrano Spagnolo was appearing on a live national television show that aims to solve missing people and murder cases when she learned late Wednesday that police had located her daughter's body.

Investigators' suspicion that a family member could be involved in her disappearance was heightened when Misseri last month contacted authorities to say that he found his niece's burned mobile phone not far from where she lived in the town of Avetrana.

"The finding of the mobile phone was virtually a way of saying 'come and get me'," Scazzi family lawyer Walter Biscotti, said on Thursday.

"It was done in a manner of a person who doesn't know how to keep a secret," he added.