The Canadian porn actor suspected of murdering and dismembering his lover was nervous and crying during the flight he took to escape from Montreal to Paris, two passengers told French radio on Tuesday.
Police in Berlin on Monday arrested Luka Rocco Magnotta, 29, at an Internet cafe after a days-long hunt for the man believed to have murdered his Chinese lover with an ice pick, dismembered his body and filmed the grisly killing.
Magnotta flew from Montreal to Paris on an Air Transat flight on May 26, two days after his lover was last seen and before the murder came to light.
Two passengers on the flight, who spoke to Europe 1 radio and wished to remain anonymous, said they sat beside Magnotta during the six-hour journey.
“He was tall, thin, androgynous, with shoulder-length hair — with a bit of a look of a teenager,” one passenger said, adding that Magnotta appeared “dirty” and “did not smell very good”.
“He was nervous during the flight. He was clearly hiding his face,” the male passenger said.
“At one he point he disappeared and I got worried — we’re all a bit paranoid on flights — and I thought ‘He’s put a bomb in the toilets.’
“But the stewardess reassured me by saying no, he wasn’t feeling well and I turned around and saw that he was crying,” the passenger said.
He said he went to the police on Monday to report having sat beside Magnotta on the flight, after seeing media coverage of the manhunt.
His travelling companion told Europe 1 they spent the weekend worried that Magnotta, who by then was known to be in Paris, might track them down.
“This weekend was the hardest, to know that he was in Paris, that he had been beside us, to realise that we had slept beside him. I had my bag at my feet, beside his feet, he could have seen my name, my address… We could have been next,” he said.
Interpol had issued a Red Notice wanted-persons alert for Magnotta, also known as Eric Clinton Newman and Vladimir Romanov, to its 190 member countries after a video of the killing surfaced online.
The murder came to light when Canadian police said last week that a human foot had been sent to the headquarters of Canada’s ruling Conservative Party.
A hand was later found in the mail at an Ottawa post office, and a torso was discovered in Montreal. Canadian police believe the remains belong to a Chinese man who was dating Magnotta and that Magnotta is to blame.
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