Jose Luis Calva was found hanging from his belt in his Mexico City jail cell.

Details about the death came from a prisons spokesman who could not be identified because of departmental rules.

It was not immediately clear how Calva had gotten hold of a belt or whether he had left a suicide note, the official said.

The Mexican, said to be a horror writer, was first arrested when police discovered bits of human arm meat on a fork and plate during a raid at his flat in the capital.

Reports at the time said officers also found a woman's torso in a cupboard, a leg in a fridge and bones in a cereal carton.

Calva, 38, was injured as he fled the property.

Prosecutors said he later admitted killing his girlfriend Alejandra Galeana, 32, but insisted that he did not eat her.

Calva claimed to have cut up the pharmacy worker's corpse and cooked it so he could hide evidence of the killing by feeding it to dogs, prosecutors added.