A man who has admitted to chopping a girl’s body into 231 pieces has told a court how he ordered a pizza halfway through because it was such hard work.

The 37-year-old accused has admitted that he spent days butchering victim Mia Skadhauge Stevn, 22, with an electric saw.

But he has denied murdering her and told a court in Denmark that she died when she accidentally strangled herself with her handbag strap.

He has pleaded guilty, however, to desecrating her corpse.

Prosecutors say the defendant raped and throttled nurse Mia and then cut her body to pieces in his bathroom in Aalborg on 6th February 2022.

The accused – who has not been named – listened as prosecutors told how Mia had gone missing after a night out clubbing.

Her butchered remains, the court heard, were found a week later.

At the time, coroners who examined what was left of her body were reportedly shocked by the sheer brutality with which she was killed.

On 8th June, the accused told the court that while he was cutting up Mia’s body he ordered a pizza and took a break to go to work.

He said that it took so long that he became hungry. He said: “I got myself a pizza. But I couldn’t eat anything.”

The defendant then took the pizza with him to work the next morning before buying chlorine, plastic buckets and other tools, the court heard.

He then returned home and continued to chop up her body, said prosecutors.

He explained: “The dismemberment took many hours.”

The court heard how butchering Mia’s body took him two nights and a day and he then took her remains to a forest in buckets and sacks.

Some body parts were flushed down a drain at his workshop, according to local media.

Prosecutors say CCTV footage shows Mia getting into the accused’s black Volkswagen Golf at 6am on the day she died.

After being traced and questioned by police, prosecutors said he showed them where he had buried the body parts.

But bizarrely he denied killing her and said she choked herself to death with her handbag.

He claimed: “I asked her if she wanted to see something great. She wanted that.

“She wanted to see men in uniform, so I took her to a forest by Hammer Bakker. I trained here myself as a soldier. She was flirting heavily.”

He stated that as they were walking through the forest, she tripped and her handbag strap wrapped around her neck, strangling her as she fell.

Bafflingly he claimed that he took her back to his car and put her in the boot.

Prosecutor Mette Bendix asked them several times why he did not call the police from the car.

The accused answered: “I felt like I had everything under control.”

He told the court that Mia must have been alive at this point because he could hear noises coming from the boot.

But when he got home, he claimed, she was no longer breathing.

He said that he first thought of abandoning her body at a bus stop, adding: “But that was idiotic because of the DNA evidence. That’s why I brought her home.”

The court heard how the accused has previous convictions for stalking and once tampered with the brakes on an ex-girlfriend’s car.

He had been single since 2014, telling the court: “As long as there is PornHub on the Internet, I don’t need a girlfriend.”

Prosecutors are demanding life imprisonment with the trial set to last four more days this month, with a verdict expected by the end of June.

The trial is ongoing.