Wednesday, June 6, 2012

Porn actor in German court over grisly killing

Montreal Police via EPA

A handout image released on Tuesday by the Montreal Police shows Luka Rocco Magnotta after his arrest in Berlin, Germany on Monday. Magnotta was arrested in connection with a murder in Montreal, Quebec, Canada which involved the discovery of part of a body in Montreal but other parts of the body mailed to political party offices in Ottawa, Canada.

By Andy Eckardt, NBC News producer in Germany

Updated at 11:02 a.m. ET: BERLIN - Luka Magnotta, the stripper and porn actor accused of killing and dismembering a man in Canada, was served with an international arrest warrant by a judge in Germany on Tuesday after a global manhunt led to his arrest in Berlin.

Meantime, Canadian police say video footage from the killing seems to show the suspect eating the body.

The fugitive was confronted by seven German police officers in an Internet caf? where he had been spotted reading news coverage about himself.


Interpol began a hunt on Thursday for Magnotta, who faces first-degree murder charges over the grisly videotaped death of Jun Lin, a 32-year-old Chinese student whose body parts were mailed to two political parties in Ottawa.?

Police told NBC News the 29-year-old was apprehended early afternoon on Monday in the city?s Neu-Koelln district after officers on patrol were flagged down by an employee of the caf?, Kadir Anlayisli.

He 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."

After an international manhunt, authorities apprehended Canadian porn actor Luka Magnotta, who is alleged to have murdered, dismembered, and cannibalized a man thought to be his boyfriend. NBC's Jim Maceda reports.

Police said Magnotta was being held at "police custody facility" at Tempelhofer Damm in central Berlin.

He was brought before judge behind closed doors at a?district court in Berlin on Tuesday, where he was presented with the arrest warrant, officials told NBC News. Officials said Magnotta will not fight extradition.

Canada, like Europe, has no death penalty, making extradition more likely.

Quebec bureau of prosecutions spokesman Rene Verret told The Associated Press Magnotta could be returned to Canada with two weeks unless he contested extradition moves.

Surveillance footage shows three police officers accompany the handcuffed Magnotta a couple of minutes after police entered the cafe.

Gore website
Montreal police say?Magnotta filmed the Chinese student's murder and posted it on a website specializing in gore. 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.

Luka Magnotta, seen in this file handout picture from Montreal police

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.

Reuters, The Associated Press and msnbc.com staff contributed to this report.

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