BRUSSELS: A 37-year-old man who said he felt humiliated by his teacher in primary school has confessed to stabbing her to death in 2020, three decades later, Belgian prosecutors said on Thursday.

       Gunter Uwents told investigators he had never got over comments teacher Maria Verlinden made about him in class in the early 1990s, starting when he was a schoolboy aged seven.

       The savage murder of 59-year-old Verlinden, at her home in Herentals near Antwerp in 2020, had gone unsolved despite repeated Belgian police inquiries and hundreds of DNA samples to try and find her killer.

       Her husband had made a public appeal for witnesses.

       She had been stabbed 101 times, according to media reports. The fact that her purse containing cash was left untouched on the dining table next to her body suggested she had not been the victim of a violent robbery.

       Sixteen months after the murder on Nov 20, 2020, Uwents admitted the crime to a friend, who alerted police, prosecutors said. He was arrested on Sunday.

       Uwents has provided a DNA sample to be compared with traces found at the murder scene. As a former pupil, he was in any case due to be caught up in the genetic-sampling dragnet.

       Published in Dawn, March 18th, 2022