This undated image taken from Santo's cellphone shows him with 17-year-old Cara Burke inside an aircraft at an unknown location. -- PHOTO: AP

'He confessed,' his lawyer Odair de Meneses said on Friday, referring to Mohamed D'Ali Carvalho Santos. 'But he is not fully responsible for his acts because he was taking drugs non-stop during the four days prior to the killing.'

Miss Cara Burke's torso was found last Monday in a suitcase on the banks of a river in Goiania, about a two-hour drive from Brasilia.

Police say Santos, 20, killed the 17-year-old on July 25 before cutting up her body because she threatened to tell his parents he was a drug dealer and was addicted to cocaine.

After stabbing Miss Burke to death, Santos attended a funk concert before returning to dismember her body, a police spokesman said.

Detectives found blood in Santos' bedroom, living room and bathroom. A photo found in his cellphone appeared to have been taken in a shower stall. It showed Miss Burke's severed head placed on the chest of her torso along with a bloody butcher knife.

She was identified by her mother by a tattoo on her back showing a heart with two arrows in it and the word 'MUM'.

Police are still trying to locate her head and limbs, which were put in a separate bag and thrown in a drain 33km away.

They said Miss Burke was Santos' girlfriend until several weeks ago, but the teenager's family insisted that the two were never a couple.

Miss Burke's brother Michael told The Times of London that his sister got to know Santos when she travelled to Brazil three months ago with two friends.

'They were not a couple. They had known each other for only a short time,' he said.

A local newspaper, Hoje Noticia, said it interviewed Santos and asked him how he felt about dismembering her body.

He replied: 'Nothing. It was like cutting up beef. Except it smelt of blood.'

AP, AFP