A 50-year-old Italian man confessed to murdering his mother in a TV interview.
Lorenzo Carbone, 50, made the confession outside his home in Spezzano di Fiorano, a town in the Emilia-Romagna region, during an interview aired by Mediaset talk show Pomeriggio5 on Monday.
Police had been searching for him since Sunday when his mother, Loretta Levrini, 80, was found deceased in her bed by her daughter.
Asked by reporter Fabio Giuffrida, a distressed Carbone said he “couldn’t take it any longer” that his mother was living with dementia.
“I strangled her, I don’t know why I did it. Every now and then she made me angry as she kept repeating herself,” he told the TV network.
Carbone told reporters he had fled to nearby Pavullo before returning to the home he had shared with his mother.
Mr Giuffrida described the moment he saw Carbone walking towards his own home and said: "Never would I have thought I would find myself in front of an alleged killer.
"At one point I noticed a man who was nearing the entrance, he was sweating, he was in a state of confusion."
The journalist asked him who he was, to which Carbone replied: "It's me".
Reporters then called the police, but aired the interview on the major network’s show as an “exclusive”, anchored by journalist Myrta Merlino.
The decision has provoked controversy within the Italian media, with colleagues accusing those involved of “tearing up the code of ethics”.
“What happened today on Pomeriggio5 is very serious,” Gaia Tortora, the deputy director of rival TV channel TG La7, wrote on X, formerly Twitter.
“This is not our job. Tearing up the code of ethics, we are hitting rock bottom.”
Ermes Antonucci, a journalist with Il Foglio newspaper, also questioned the need to broadcast an interview “with a man in an evident state of confusion”.
“Wasn’t it enough to call the police, as was fortunately done, and then explain what happened, without airing the video?,” he said. “The media circus has reached a real low point.”
But Ms Merlino defended the broadcast, saying it had not jeaopardised the police investigation.
“I received a call from the correspondent a few minutes before going live,” she said.
“I had little time to decide. I only care about one thing: that it doesn’t damage the investigation. The man was wanted. The police were called and authorised me to broadcast the images of the interview.”
A post-mortem examination into Ms Levrini’s death is due to be held in the next few days.
