A student who fled Italy after kidnapping and stabbing his former girlfriend to death has confessed to murdering her in a court hearing in Germany.

Accused Filippo Turetta, 22, hacked his ex Giulia Cecchettin, 22, with a knife and then wrapped her body in a plastic bag before dumping it into a gully about 75 miles away from Venice, Italy.

Turetta was arrested by German police on a European arrest warrant a week after the killing on Saturday, 11th November, when his car ran out of petrol on the A9 autobahn near Leipzig.

Now at an extradition hearing at the Naumburg Higher Regional Court, Saxony-Anhalt State, on Tuesday, 21st November, he has confessed to murdering Giulia.

He claimed he had planned to take his own life but was too cowardly to go through with it.

Turetta told judges: “I killed Giulia, I killed my girlfriend.”

He claimed: “I wandered around for days because I was trying to end it.

“I thought about crashing into an obstacle, and several times I held a knife to my throat, but I didn’t have the courage to end it.”

Turetta added: “I tried several times to put an end to it, but I didn’t have the courage.”

After the hearing, Naumburg judges agreed to send him back to Italy on a military flight.

The court said: “The Naumburg Higher Regional Court ordered the extradition of an Italian citizen who was previously provisionally arrested on the basis of the European Arrest Warrant issued by an Italian court.

“According to the European Arrest Warrant, the person being pursued is accused of having intentionally physically abused another person in Italy to such an extent that this treatment led to their death.”

Turetta is accused of stabbing his 22-year-old former girlfriend to death and then throwing her body from his car down a slope near Lake Barcis.

During his arrest officers found a broken knife in his car which was sent to Italian police for forensic tests.

Italian media revealed that Giulia’s autopsy will be carried out on Friday, 1st December.

Investigators are said to be certain she was already dead when Turetta shoved her down the slope.

She suffered multiple stab wounds to the neck and head, and had bruises all over her hands and arms where she apparently tried to fight off Turetta, said police.

Surveillance camera footage used to reconstruct the killing shows Giulia fought for 22 minutes before he overpowered her.

She had been due to receive her degree in biomedical engineering from Padua University, where the couple first met.

The investigation in Italy is ongoing.