Mohamed Januzi Germany migrant child killed
A Berlin police poster asking for help in locating four-year-old migrant Mohamed Januzi TOBIAS SCHWARZ/AFP/Getty Images

In a case that shocked Germany, the self-confessed killer of a migrant boy admitted to kidnapping and slaying another child who had gone missing earlier this year. The 32-year-old man was arrested by police in Berlin on 29 October, thanks to a tip off from his mother.

After a child's body was found in the truck his car, he confessed to killing four-year-old Mohamed Januzi, from Bosnia, who disappeared from capital's central registration centre for asylum-seekers on 1 October.

Later, he told detectives he had also abducted and killed another boy, a six-year-old named Elias, who had vanished from a playground near his parent's home in Potsdam, west of Berlin, in July. Local media reported that police believe both killings were sexually motivated and named the alleged paedophile only as Silvio S, a German national.

The suspect was arrested at the house he shared with his mother in Brandenburg, in the wake of a large police effort in the search for four-year-old Januzi.

Authorities had offered a €10,000 (£7,100, $11,000) reward for information leading to a man captured on security camera leading the child away from the migrant centre in the Moabit suburb. Januzi had accompanied his 28-year-old mother and two siblings there, as the family was seeking asylum in Germany two years after moving to the country from Bosnia.

Security footage released by police showed a bearded man walking away from the centre hand-in-hand with the four year old. The images were seen by Silvio S's mother, who recognised her son and turned him in.

Detectives were interviewing her at the family house, when the suspect reportedly walked in. Confronted, he immediately confessed to killing Januzi the day after the abduction. He then said he had buried the second boy Elias's body in a small garden nearby. The area was being searched by police.