Italian prosecutors said on Monday that a suspect has confessed to murdering a 33-year-old man Stefano Leo in Turin in February.

The suspect said he killed Leo because he looked happy.

33-year-old Leo from Biella a town in the northern Italian region of Piedmont, was stabbed last February 23 along the Murazzi, before managing to drag himself to a flight of steps, where he died soon after.

The suspect, Said Machaouat, a 27-year-old Italian with Moroccan roots, turned himself in at the weekend.

“I chose to kill that young man because he looked happy. And I couldn’t stand his happiness,” Machaouat said, according to the prosecutors.

Machaouat was quoted as telling prosecutors Ciro Santoriello and Enzo Bucarelli that “I wanted to kill a lad like me, to take away all his prospects, his children, his friends and relatives”.

The suspect, who showed investigators to where a kitchen knife that is thought to have been the murder weapon was, said he was depressed after splitting up with his ex-wife.

“The worst thing was knowing that my four-year-old boy was calling a friend of my ex-partner daddy,” Machaouat was quoted as saying.

Mechaout had married very young and had a criminal record for family maltreatment. In 2012 he had a son with a woman from Turin, who had left him in 2015: from there a period of depression started for him.