Police in Hamburg, Germany, have arrested a 37-year-old chemical factory worker for murdering his 100-year-old grandmother and hacking off her head with an axe.

The suspect, identified as one Artur B, was taken into custody last Monday morning after he himself called the Hamburg-Stellingen police to report that he had just killed his grandmother, Ms Amalie G, a retired farm worker.

“According to the preliminary autopsy result, it can be assumed that a neck cut caused by a sharp weapon was the cause of death. The suspected means of the crime is an axe found at the crime scene,” senior prosecutor Liddy Oechtering told the German tabloid Bild.

Artur appears to have dealt the first blow from behind his grandmother. Investigators were still determining a motive, but neighbours said Artur often had heated and loud arguments with Ms Amalie, usually over money.

“Artur is the black sheep of the family. He had a job at a chemical factory, but mostly he was unemployed and always had no money. Family members kept their distance from him,” a relative told Bild.

A neighbour said Ms Amalie told her that Artur once broke into her apartment through a balcony and tried to steal her modest savings.

Another neighbour said: “The grandson regularly came to his grandmother’s apartment and took care of her. But there were still arguments.”

This macabre incident follows several other crimes in Germany involving weapons like axes or swords in recent years.

A Tunisian migrant was arrested in Augsburg in 2020 after attacking two people, one of whom was a bus driver, with a machete and an axe. He was placed in a psychiatric facility following his arrest.

Before that, in 2019, a 36-year-old man was hacked to death, apparently with a katana-style sword, in the middle of a street in Stuttgart, with footage of the deadly attack appearing online.

The attacker, a Syrian migrant who arrived at the height of the European migrant crisis in 2015, was later arrested by the police.