AP Photo / Interpol
Luka Rocco Magnotta is accused of videotaping a gruesome murder before posting it to the Internet.
Updated at 10:40 pm ET: When German police confronted a fugitive Canadian porn actor accused of killing and dismembering a Chinese student, he resisted until he admitted, “You got me.”
Luka Magnotta, 29, was being held in Berlin, Germany’s capital city, on Monday. He was spotted at an Internet cafe in the Neukölln district, according to officials in the German capital.
Magnotta had spent two hours reading coverage about himself at an Internet cafe when he was detained.
“We knew and always said that he used the web to glorify himself,” Montreal police spokesman Ian Lafreniere told the Toronto Star.
Interpol issued an arrest warrant on Thursday for Magnotta, who faces first-degree murder charges over the videotaped death of Jun Lin, a 32-year-old Chinese student whose body parts were mailed to two political parties in Ottawa.
German police spokesman Stefan Redlich said seven uniformed police were sent to the Neukölln district after the suspect was recognized by a cafe employee. “They talked to the individual and said they wanted to see some identification. He tried to give them a false name, but the police insisted, so he said, ‘You’ve got me,’ and we arrested him,” he said.
Kadir Anlayisli, the employee who recognized Magnotta, told a Turkish newspaper cited by the Toronto Star, “He was wearing sunglasses for a while, but I was sure that he was the wanted man.”
Surveillance camera footage of the German 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, who directed him to his assigned computer with the number 25 where he would later be spotted reading the news about his case.
Paris police probe sighting of fugitive Canadian porn actor wanted for murder
Anlayisli told the Star he wasn’t sure if it was Magnotta, adding that the man had an “ice cold gaze.”
He worried about calling police initially, worried he had made an error. Even so he looked out for police officers who might be passing by. When he spotted a van of officers, “they looked at me like I was joking,” he told the Star.
Ultimately, seven German police officers walked into the shop.
On the camera footage, three police officers accompany the handcuffed Magnotta a couple of minutes after they entered the venue. Magnotta calmly walks alongside them, again wearing sunglasses.
Redlich, the police spokesman, said Magnotta would be detained overnight and that a judge would decide the next steps on Tuesday.
Gore website
Montreal police say Magnotta and Jun were both in the video, which was posted on a Canadian website that specializes in gore.
Authorities say Magnotta filmed the Chinese student’s murder and posted it online. The video shows a man with an ice pick stabbing another naked, bound male. He also dismembers the corpse and performs sexual acts with it in what police called a horrifying video.
The warning signs apparently were 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 have released a photo from the video which they say is of Magnotta.
Magnotta was accused of sexually assaulting a woman in 2005, but the charges were dropped, the lawyer who represented him at the time said.
In a crime scene Montreal police say is the worst they have seen, his Montreal apartment included a bloody mattress and pools of blood on the floor and in the refrigerator. The police said a janitor found a torso with no head or limbs in a suitcase in an alley behind the building.
Toronto lawyer Peter Scully said he represented Magnotta in a fraud case in 2004 and a sexual assault case in 2005.
“I’ve had lots of creepy characters and Eric did not stand out as one of them,” he said. Scully refers to his client by his previous name, Eric Newman.
But Nina Arsenault, a Toronto transsexual who said she had a relationship with Magnotta over a decade ago, described him as a drug user with a temper, who sometimes turned his anger on himself, hitting himself on the head, and other parts of his body.
While Magnotta described himself in an online video interview with a site called “Naked News” as a stripper and male escort, Lin was registered as an undergraduate in the engineering department and computer science at Concordia University in Montreal.
Video: ‘Cannibal killer’ is target of manhunt
Authorities believe that a decomposing foot mailed to the headquarters of the governing Conservative Party in Ottawa on Tuesday and a hand found inside a package at a postal depot are parts of the same person.
Meantime, Interpol hailed the arrest Monday as a showcasing of the value of international police cooperation.
At the request of Canadian authorities, Interpol issued a so-called Red Notice for Magnotta on Thursday, and he was detained four days later in Berlin.
The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.
More world news from msnbc.com and NBC News:
- US drone strikes in Pakistan kill 27 people in 3 days
- New Vatican documents leaked after arrest of pope’s butler
- Murderer’s corpse dragged from car, eaten by bear in Canada
- Google tells Chinese when they’re being censored
Follow us on Twitter: @msnbc_world
Related posts:
Views: 0