IT WAS the moment Deborah Rizzato had feared since her evidence helped to convict the man who raped her ten years earlier, when she was 15.

As she arrived for the early shift at a textile factory in northern Italy on Tuesday, the man who had spent a decade behind bars planning his revenge was waiting in the snow-covered car park.

He rammed her Peugeot 205 with a stolen car. When the terrified young woman got out and crawled behind another car for protection, he pursued her, drew a knife and stabbed her repeatedly, killing her.

Shortly after the attack, Signora Rizzato’s colleagues, arriving for work at the factory at Biella, noticed what they thought was a bundle in the snow. “We thought at first she was the victim of a hit-and-run accident,” one said.

She had been attacked with such ferocity that hospital workers at first did not recognise her fatal injuries as stab wounds.

Police immediately launched a nationwide manhunt, and yesterday arrested Emiliano Santangelo, 33, in Genoa on suspicion of murder. He had been involved in a road accident while driving Signora Rizzato’s Peugeot, and had tried to make a run for it, even though he was injured.

The killing has shocked a country used to a daily diet of murder stories, not least because prosecutors claim that Signora Rizzato had been repeatedly threatened by Santangelo, but neither the police nor the authorities had thought to protect her.

Signora Rizzato, who worked as a quality controller in the textile factory, was raped in 1995 with a group of other girls in their mid-teens.

Although terrified, she went to the police and agreed to give evidence against Santangelo, a Sicilian-born unemployed man living on state benefits in a nearby village between Turin and the Swiss-Italian border.

He was initially sentenced to three years, but after his release was almost immediately sent back to jail for a further seven years for other sexual offences. The thickset Santangelo was freed three months ago and ordered to report regularly to police.

Antonio Bianco, the Turin prosecutor, said that Santangelo had repeatedly threatened Signora Rizzato from prison and during periods of day release. He claimed to have photographs of his rape victims which he threatened to make public.

Friends said that Signora Rizzato had tried to live a normal life, even though she knew that her attacker had been set free. “But it was really Deborah who was the prisoner all along,” La Stampa, the Turin daily, said. “She was a prisoner of fear for ten long years, and in the end he got her. Her life bled away in the snow — a nightmare which ended another nightmare.”

Signora Rizzato’s sister, Simona, 23, said it had always been clear that Santangelo had “psychological problems”.

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