Rome: AN Italian who doused a homeless man in petrol and set him alight as he slept has confessed to the killing, telling police he acted out of jealousy.
Giuseppe Pecoraro, a petrol pump attendant, admitted the attack after Marcello Cimino burned to death outside a mission run by Capuccin monks in Palermo, Sicily.
“He thought Cimino was after his wife,” local police chief Rodolfo Ruperti said. “They had had a fight about her a few days earlier.”
Pecoraro was arrested with burns on his hands, apparently incurred during a fatal attack which was captured by security cameras.
Video footage shows the attacker approaching 45-year-old as he slept under heavy bedding in a portico outside the mission. He empties a bucket of flammable liquid on the bedding, takes a lighter from his pocket and sets it alight, sparking an blaze that the attacker only just escaped himself. Neighbours heard the victim screaming but he was dead by the time emergency services arrived at the scene of a killing.
