A Moroccan man kidnapped a three-year-old girl, murdered her, wrested her heart out of her chest and cut the body into pieces before he started cooking the parts. Her parents who entered the killer’s house stood in horror watching him preparing their own daughter as his meal.

The girl went missing in the northern town of Tangier on Sunday, triggering a massive police manhunt. Her parents were told by a local resident that he had seen a man taking the child into his apartment.

“The parents rushed to that flat in the hope they will find their daughter… when they were in, they were stunned… their daughter lay before their eyes cut into many pieces while the killer had already taken her heart out of her chest and placed it in a container to cook it,” the Moroccan daily Hespress said.

“They then saw him cutting onion and adding spice to the remaining parts of her body…he has already started cooking the girl’s hands and legs… it was an unprecedented savagery that also stunned the police themselves.”

The paper said police arrested the man, who was identified as Abdul Rahim. It said he was born in 1981 and had migrated to Spain for nearly 13 before returning to Morocco around three years ago.

“Forensic experts are examining parts of the girl to determine whether she had been raped before she was murdered,” it said.