Italy: Senegalese illegal immigrant arrested over murder of US woman Ashley Olsen

Italian police have arrested a Senegalese illegal immigrant who prosecutors believe killed Ashley Olsen, a U.S. woman who was found dead in her apartment in Florence last weekend. "We have collected very serious evidence of his guilt," Florence chief prosecutor Giuseppe Creazzo told reporters at a news conference on Thursday after the man was arrested and questioned in the early hours of the morning. Creazzo said the man, named as Diaw Cheik Tidianee, had met the 35-year-old Olsen in a local nightclub and that the two had consensual sex in her home under the influence of alcohol, and possibly drugs, before he killed her.

She was strangled in the early hours of Friday, Creazzo said, but the autopsy revealed that she had two fractures to her skull -- injuries that would also have proved fatal. The case has attracted huge international media attention and investigators were keen to avoid any repeat of the drawn-out saga that followed the 2007 killing of British student Meredith Kercher in Perugia, not far from Florence. Kercher's American flatmate Amanda Knox and her Italian boyfriend spent almost four years in prison for the crime before finally being acquitted last year by Italy's highest appeals court.

During a long interrogation that ended at 4.00 a.m. local time, Tidianee had "substantially admitted" the prosecutors' reconstruction of events, Creazzo said. Tidianee and his lawyers have not made any public comment but Italian media said he told police he had not meant to kill Olsen, but that she had fallen during a row.