Man accused of suffocating boy, 8, before dismembering him

A man suspected of killing an eight-year-old boy has told investigators that he suffocated him before dismembering his body.

The information is part of a confession by Levi Aron, according to a law enforcement official in New York.

Aron also reportedly told investigators he took Leiby Kletzky to a wedding in upstate New York.

Thousands of mourners gathered at Leiby's funeral.

The Brooklyn boy got lost while walking home alone from day camp in his Orthodox Jewish neighbourhood.

He was killed by a stranger, allegedly Aron, who he had asked for directions, and his remains were found stuffed in a rubbish bin and the man's refrigerator.

The gruesome killing shocked the tight-knit Hasidic community in Borough Park, in part because it is one of the safest sections of the city and because Aron is himself an Orthodox Jew.

A day-and-a-half search for the Hasidic boy ended with the discovery of his severed feet inside a bloody freezer at the home of Aron who had been spotted with him on a surveillance video.

The rest of the remains were in the rubbish in another neighbourhood.

"It is every parent's worst nightmare," Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly.

Police said there was no evidence the boy was sexually assaulted, but they would not otherwise shed any light on a motive except to say Aron told them he "panicked" when he saw photos of the missing boy on fliers that were distributed in the neighbourhood.

Police were looking into whether Aron had a history of mental illness.

Aron was arrested on a charge of second-degree murder. It was not clear whether he had a lawyer.

Meanwhile, thousands gathered around a Borough Park synagogue for the boy's funeral service, with speakers broadcasting over a loudspeaker and intermittently breaking down in sobs. They spoke and chanted in Yiddish and Hebrew, stressing the community's resilience and unity after what one called an unnatural death.

"There's no greater pain than this," one said, as translated by a mourner.

The Hasidim are ultra-Orthodox Jews who live in somewhat insular neighbourhoods. The streets are policed by a group of volunteers known as the Shomrim patrol. Many of the mothers who gathered outside the Kletzky family home said the streets are normally safe enough for a child to walk home alone.

Adel Erps, like other neighbours, expressed shock the suspect was Jewish. "He's a sick person obviously, but it hurts so much more," she said.

Aron's family was Orthodox but not Hasidic, and he lives about a dozen blocks away from the Kletzky family.

When detectives arrived at his attic apartment around 2:40am local time, they asked him where the boy was, and he nodded toward the kitchen, Kelly said.

Detectives saw blood on the freezer door and opened it to discover the feet inside, wrapped in plastic bags.

A cutting board and three bloody carving knives were in the refrigerator, and a plastic garbage bag with bloody towels was found nearby.

Aron told police where to find the rest of the body; it was in pieces, wrapped in plastic bags, inside a red suitcase that had been tossed into a trash bin in another Brooklyn neighbourhood, Kelly said.

Police and volunteers had been looking since late Monday afternoon for Leiby, who disappeared while on his way to meet his mother on a street corner seven blocks from his day camp. This was the first time he was allowed to walk the route alone; his parents had taken him on a practice run on Friday.

The break in the case came when investigators watched a grainy video that showed the boy, wearing his backpack, getting into a car with a man outside a dentist's office. Police said the boy had evidently missed a turn and got lost.

Detectives tracked the dentist down at his home in New Jersey, and he remembered someone coming to pay a bill. Police identified Aron using records from the office, and 40 minutes later he was arrested.

Police said Aron, who is divorced, lives alone in the attic, in a building shared with his father and uncle. When they arrived, the door was ajar. It's not clear how long the boy had been dead, Kelly said.

Kelly said it was "totally random" that Aron grabbed the boy, and aside from a summons for urinating in public, he had no criminal record. A neighbour told authorities her son had said Aron had once tried to lure him into his car, but nothing happened and she didn't think much of it until the news of the killing, police said.

Aron's ex-wife, Deborah, who lives in Memphis, said he never showed signs of violence toward her two children from a previous relationship.

"It's utter disbelief," she said. "This ain't the Levi I know."