Suspect nabbed in Berlin surfing porn
Accused killer Luka Rocco Magnotta’s short time on lam ends in Internet café
BERLIN — The chameleon dubbed the Butcher of Montreal and Canadian Psycho by the media was arrested Monday while looking at pornography and reading stories about the grisly murder he is accused of committing in Montreal on the night of May 24, and the international manhunt that crime triggered.
Luka Rocco Magnotta’s short time on the lam ended less than two hours after being assigned cubicle 25. It is up nine steps at the back of the tidy 24- hour Spätkauf (“late buy”) Internet café, tobacco and alcohol shop at 156 Karl- Marx- Strasse in the suburb of Neukölln, where most residents are either Turkish, Kurdish or Arab.
Cafe employee Kadir Anlayisli said he thought he recognized Magnotta — raised as Eric Clinton Newman in the Toronto suburb of Scarborough — from a blitz of Internet and TV images of the accused and immediately called police to report his whereabouts.
Less than two hours later, seven policemen took Magnotta down without a fight. A great self- publicist on the Internet before his crime, Magnotta probably had his wish when police released surveillance video of his arrest.
After first denying his identity, Magnotta was quoted by the Spiegel news magazine as telling police: “You got me.”
Stefan Redlich, chief inspector of the Berlin police, said “there was no resistance. Not against seven police officers.
“A lot of legal questions will need to be answered before he’s sent anywhere. We only had the arrest warrant so won’t be investigating the case.”
Reached by the Ottawa Citizen, Magnotta’s mother declined to comment.
The mutilated torso of Chinese university student Jun Lin was discovered in a suitcase behind an apartment in the Montreal district of Cote des Neiges.
Dix Franke, a Montrealer who frequents the Spätkauf Internet Cafe daily said the standard tariff to surf the web is only 40 euro cents ( about 50 cents Canadian) for a 30- minute session.
Franke described the area where Magnotta was trying to hide as similar to where the suspect lived.
“It was very multicultural with people from everywhere,” said Franke, 21. “It is a place that attracts people who cannot afford Internet in their home.”
Magnotta is believed to have flown from Montreal to Paris the day after he is alleged to have murdered Lin.
Police from Montreal were on their way to Berlin to arrange Magnotta’s extradition. A German official said Germany hoped to comply with a Canadian request to return him to Canada as soon as possible.
If Magnotta does not oppose extradition when he appears in court today, he could be on an airplane back to Montreal almost immediately. Even if he opposes extradition, there appears to be so much evidence against him in Quebec that German authorities hope he will be on his way back there within one or two weeks.
Video cameras captured images of Magnotta as he walked into the Internet café beside a part of Berlin known as Little Istanbul. Although he fancied himself a master of disguise, Magnotta’s hair was his own and he was simply dressed in jeans, sunglasses and a black jacket fitted with a hood at the time of his arrest.
Magnotta is facing five charges in Montreal, including first- degree murder, causing an indignity to a body, corrupting morals, using the mail system to deliver “obscene, indecent, immoral or scurrilous” material, and harassing Prime Minister Stephen Harper.
Surveillance at airports and train stations in France was intensified to try to ensure that Magnotta did not elude a police dragnet but apparently he slipped through Friday, taking a bus to Berlin from Paris’s main international terminal.
France’s Le Figaro newspaper, which quoted police as saying officers were “terrified” of Magnotta, reported he spent two nights last week at the Studio Batignolles, a cheap hotel in Paris’s affluent 17th arrondissement. Curtains were drawn at Le Petit Batignolles, but the manager of the nearby bar was quoted as saying that police had taken away an empty bottle he may have used to check for fingerprints and DNA, and were studying security videos.
Officials had also seized pornographic magazines and an Air Canada “vomit bag” from the room where he had stayed.
French police were tipped to Magnotta’s presence by a homosexual Internet acquaintance with whom he was said to have spent one night in the suburb of Clichy after arriving in Paris from Canada. Magnotta had been betrayed by his cellphone use, allowing police to trace his movements.