Spain: U.S. woman killed in Seville, body chopped up

A 49-year-old American woman who lived in the southern Spanish city of Seville was killed, cut up into pieces and thrown into a river, police said Wednesday.

A 30-year-old Spanish man who knew the victim has been arrested, and a police search of his apartment turned up blood stains, a National Police official said. The nature of their relationship and any possible motive for the killing were not immediately known.

The woman, a mother of one child, was a longtime resident of Seville and a native of New York, the official said, without specifying if that meant the city or the state. She was reported missing over the  weekend.

Authorities have identified the woman but will not release her name, in line with Spanish police policy, the official said. They identified the suspect only by the initials A.G.S.

Police divers searched near a bridge over the Guadalquivir River for two days and found a bag containing the woman’s head and one of her arms and a suitcase with the rest of her body, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity in line with department rules.

The police official would not confirm Spanish media reports that the suspect had confessed to police or that the victim had worked as an English teacher.

The Spanish newspaper El Pais said in its online edition that the victim had not been sexually assaulted before she was killed, according to an autopsy.

The suspect had been facing a court summons for a previous, unspecified offense, the official said.

The U.S. Embassy in Madrid and the U.S. consulate in Seville said they had no information on the case.