Couple confess to killing four ‘noisy’ neighbours

AN Italian couple have confessed to killing four neighbours including a toddler after a long feud over noise, a prosecutor said yesterday, resolving a gruesome murder case that has held the country in thrall.

Thirty-year-old Raffaella Castagna, her two-year-old son, her mother and a neighbour were found with their throats slit on December 11 in Castagna's apartment in the wealthy northern town of Erba. Their home had been set on fire.

The press immediately fingered Castagna's husband, a Tunisian immigrant recently freed from jail under a mass pardon, only to offer rare front-page apologies when it emerged that at the time of the murders he was on a trip to his homeland.