BANGKOK, May 10: A Pakistani man has been arrested on suspicion of smothering a Thai woman he met through an internet chat room and then chopping up her body, police said on Wednesday.

Muhammad Arif, a 33-year-old employee of a Thai shipping firm who could face the death penalty by lethal injection, was arrested at a Bangkok hotel on Monday after a tip-off from a taxi driver, they said.

The taxi driver called police to say he had driven the man and two bags, later found to contain the torso and other body parts of a woman, to a dump site in a city suburb. The head of Disney Thongnakthae, a 28-year-old English teacher from the northeastern province of Ubon Ratchathani, was found on Tuesday in another bag dumped in a Bangkok canal and her two feet were found in another bag on Wednesday, police said.

They said Arif told them he killed the woman in a fit of rage after she accused him of using someone else’s picture on the internet and demanded he pay her plane fare home.

“He confessed to killing her by smothering her with a pillow in the hotel room and couldn’t figure out how to hide the body,” Police Lieutenant-Colonel Soonthorn Kongklum said.

“He then went to buy some knives to chop her up.”

Police said they found blood stains on Arif and Disney’s clothes, mobile phone and purse in his room.—Reuters