Michael Sinval Pereira, 45, has been arrested on charges of killing his partner Sueli Leal Barbosa, the 48-year-old who died yesterday in Milan after jumping out of a window while trying to save herself from a fire that destroyed the fourth-floor apartment of a condominium on Viale Abruzzi.

According to investigators , it was him who started the fire and locked the door from the outside .

Pereira works as a house painter and had been in a relationship with Barbosa for about three years. The two, both Brazilians, had reportedly had several arguments in the past, even violent ones, so much so that the 48-year-old herself had asked the police to intervene in March last year.

This is his version, after denying the argument and saying that the fire could have started from the boiler: "Sueli and I argued, she was angry with me because she wanted me to join her in bed instead of drinking, I got nervous, I smoked a cigarette and a moment before going out I threw it on the carpet that was in front of the sofa. She was a cleanliness maniac, I just wanted to spite her, I didn't think I would start a fire . I should point out that she cleaned the carpet and the sofa with alcohol and ammonia."

In the arrest warrant, the prosecutor Maura Ripamonti wrote that the man "did not show any form of pain or even regret and gradually adjusted his version with lies, from the time he left the house, to the absence of arguments with the woman, to the presence of alternative causes of the fire such as the malfunctioning of the boiler, which in reality was found to be in order ."

(Unioneonline/L)

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