Canada body-parts supect caught reading about case in café
A porn actor suspected of murdering and dismembering a Chinese student and posting his body parts to Canada’s top political parties was reading about himself on the internet when he was arrested at a Berlin cafe.
Canadian investigators say 29-year-old Luka Magnotta’s obsessions led him to post internet videos of his killing kittens, then a man, and finally to his arrest at the cafe where he had spent two hours reading media coverage of himself.
An international manhunt set off by a case of internet gruesomeness that captured global attention ended quietly in the working-class Neukoelln district of the German capital when a cafe employee recognised Magnotta from a newspaper photo and flagged down a police car.
Confronted by seven officers, the Canadian “tried at first giving fake names but in the end he just said, ’You got me’,” said police spokesman Guido Busch. “He didn’t resist.”
Magnotta is wanted by Canadian authorities on suspicion of killing Jun Lin, a 33-year-old man he dated, and posting his body parts to Canada’s two top political parties.
They say Magnotta filmed the murder of the student from from Wuhan, China and posted it online.
The video shows a man with an ice pick stabbing another naked, bound man. He also dismembers the corpse and performs sexual acts in what police called a horrifying video.
The warning signs were apparently already there. For nearly two years animal activists had been looking for a man who tortured and killed cats and posted videos of his cruelty online. Since Jun Lin’s murder, Montreal police had released a photo from the video which they said was of Magnotta.
In 2005 Magnotta was accused of sexually assaulting a woman, but the charges were dropped, the lawyer who represented him at the time said.
Magnotta is believed to have fled to France on May 26, based on evidence police found at his apartment and a blog he once posted about disappearing.
In Germany, surveillance camera footage of the internet cafe, obtained by The Associated Press, showed Magnotta casually walking into the shop at noon local time, wearing jeans, a green hoodie sweater and sunglasses.
He briefly spoke to the internet cafe’s desk person, then walked off to his assigned computer with the number 25 where he would later be spotted reading the news about his case.
About two hours later, seven German police officers are seen walking into the shop, without any haste or pointed arms.
On the camera footage, three police officers are seen accompanying the handcuffed Magnotta a couple of minutes after they first entered the venue. Magnotta calmly walks alongside them, again wearing sunglasses.
In Germany, police spokeswoman Kerstin Ziesmer said Magnotta was being questioned and would be brought before a judge behind closed doors.
“He says he is the wanted person,” she added.
Quebec bureau of prosecutions spokesman Rene Verret said it could take a long time to get him back to Canada, but if Magnotta did not contest the order he could be returned within a couple of weeks.
The case’s full horror emerged when a package containing a severed foot was opened at the ruling Conservative Party headquarters on May 29.
That same day a hand was discovered at a postal facility, addressed to the Liberal party of Canada. And a torso was found in a suitcase on a rubbish dump in Montreal, outside Magnotta’s apartment building. Police in masks combed through the blood-soaked Montreal studio apartment last Wednesday.
As they unraveled his background, police discovered that Luka Magnotta changed his name from Eric Clinton Newman in 2006 and that he was born in Scarborough, Ontario. He is also known as Vladimir Romanov, is white, 5ft 8ins, with blue eyes and black hair.
His mother, Anna Yourkin, in Peterbourgh, Ontario, said she had no comment, apologised and hung up the phone.
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