A professor who believed his young wife to be having an affair has reportedly cut off her lips in a fit of jealousy and eaten them.

"He cut off her lips and ate them," Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet quoted an unnamed source close to the case as saying.

"He doesn't seem to regret anything. He thinks she is the one who has offended him," the source added.

The man, an associate professor at Sweden's prestigious Karolinska Institute whose name was not given, was reportedly being held on suspicion of attempted murder, according to the report.

"She is of course not doing well, neither psychologically nor physically," the woman's lawyer Ingela Ekman Hessius told Aftonbladet.