A suspect has confessed to murdering 15 women after luring them into budget hotel rooms in Nigeria, potentially ending a killing spree that has terrorised the country’s oil capital, Port Harcourt.

Gracious David-West, believed to be 39 and unemployed, said that “an irresistible urge to kill” had repeatedly driven him onto the streets in search of female victims over the past two months.

“I take a girl into a hotel, we eat, make love and sleep,” he told a press conference in Port Harcourt, where he was arrested last week. “Later I wake up in the middle of the night and put a kitchen knife to her neck ordering her not to shout.”

After turning up the volume on the television, Mr David-West said he would tie his victims up with strips torn from the pillow-case on his bed before strangling them.

“I don’t know what comes over me to kill,” he added. “After I have killed I feel remorse and cry but after that the irresistible urge to kill comes over me again.”

At least nine of the victims were killed in Port Harcourt, including three murdered over a single weekend earlier this month.

The killings prompted widespread anger in the city, which mounted after the regional police chief, Mustapha Dandaura, suggested that the women were partly responsible for their deaths, saying, “I don’t know why people will be sleeping with people they don’t know.”