A brute has confessed to suffocating his ex’s five-year-old son, tying a weight to his leg, and drowning him in a river.

Tragic Davi Heitor Prates was playing with his younger brother in front of the family home in the Brazilian municipality of Colider on 3rd March when he went missing.

CCTV footage later surfaced of the lad on the back of a motorcycle piloted by his mum’s ex, Jose Edson Santana, moments before he was killed.

Santana later told police he had told the boy to get on the bike because they were going to buy a meal.

Santana rode to the municipality of Nova Canaa do Norte, where he parked the motorcycle he had borrowed from a colleague.

He took Davi to a riverbank, telling him he would show him the fish. But instead, he suffocated him to death.

He then tied a large stone to one of the dead boy’s legs with a piece of rope and dumped the body in the middle of the river.

Police said Santana had been Davi’s mother’s boyfriend, and although the couple had split, he was still trusted by her children.

Santana was seized on 4th March after confessing to the crime. Under questioning, he claimed not to remember the reason he decided to kill the boy.

Civil Police said he would be transferred to a prison in the municipality of Sinop on remand.

Santana told police where he had committed the crime, and officers found Davi’s sandals nearby on 5th March.

A day later, on 6th March, they recovered the tragic lad’s body.

The investigation continues.