This is the wall under a staircase in which the dead body of a young mother of two was concreted up by two builders, one of whom is suspected of having raped her.

The crime was discovered when the owner of the building site on which the wall had been newly laid noticed a bad smell and called the police on Tuesday, 5th October.

Officers arrived on the scene and knocked a hole in the wall, in which they found the naked dead body of 25-year-old Joice Maria da Gloria Rodrigues with a T-shirt wrapped around her neck.

The victim, who was a student, lived with her husband and two daughters in the Brazilian city of Sao Vicente, which is also where the crime took place.

It was after she visited her grandfather at his house on Monday, 27th September, that she went missing.

After she failed to return home, her worried relatives tried to call her on her mobile phone, which went straight to voicemail. They promptly filed a missing person report with the police.

Her dead body was found eight days later, and the police swiftly arrested two suspects, a 56-year-old bricklayer and a 35-year-old contractor, who were working on the building site.

The latter denied any wrongdoing, but the former confessed to killing the young woman and concealing her corpse, also implicating his colleague in the crimes.

He also told the police he had maintained consensual sexual relations with the woman before her death, according to local media.

However, the police have not ruled out the possibility of sexual abuse, and they are awaiting the findings of the post-mortem to determine if any crime of a sexual nature was committed.

Police chief Thiago Nemi Bonametti, who is heading the investigation, believes there was an argument at the site between the young woman and the contractor for unknown reasons.

According to Bonametti, it was the contractor who first started to strangle the woman before he asked for help from his colleague, who then assisted him.

After killing the woman, both suspects are believed to have concreted her up in the wall. After the crime, the two men are believed to have continued working on the site for several days as if nothing had happened.

The police also seized plastic containers used to store cocaine and a bag containing knickers from the crime scene.

The two men remain in preventive custody as the investigation continues. The police are treating the crime as a femicide.