Luka Rocco Magnotta will not fight extradition from Germany

Luka Rocco Magnotta, the Canadian porn actor wanted for the murder and dismemberment of his lover, has told a judge he will not fight his extradition from Germany, prosecutors say.

Luka Rocco Magnotta, 29, appeared in a Berlin court to have his arrest confirmed, a day after he was detained.

Canadian authorities are preparing papers to request his extradition.

Police detained him in an internet cafe in Berlin after an employee recognized his face from a newspaper.

Luka Rocco Magnotta is suspected of killing Chinese student Jun Lin, 33, in Montreal, and posting severed body parts to political parties in Canada.

“He said he would not fight the extradition,” Martin Steltner, a spokesman for the Berlin public prosecutor’s office, told AFP after the hearing on Tuesday.

The extradition process could take months, but Martin Steltner said it “will be easier and will be faster” now that Luka Rocco Magnotta has said he will not oppose it.

 

Police say Luka Rocco Magnotta flew from Montreal to Paris on 26 May, eventually travelling by coach from France to Germany.

Montreal Police Commander Ian Lafreniere said investigators were extremely relieved and pleased about the arrest.

“We said from the beginning that the web has been used to glorify himself and we believe the web brought him down,” he added.

“He was recognized because his photo was everywhere.”

Luka Rocco Magnotta was picked up in the cybercafe in Berlin’s Neukoelln district, where he had reportedly been reading articles about himself.

“A colleague recognized him from his photo because he’d just read the newspaper,” the cafe owner told the Associated Press news agency.

The employee, Kadir Anlayisli, ran outside and flagged down a passing police van.

“He came in with glasses on, he took his glasses off and talked to me in French,” Kadir Anlayisli told AP.

“I looked at him and thought I knew him from somewhere, because I read newspapers every day. I was perplexed and thought I should look at him again, and when I watched him, he was checking the same web page that I had just checked.”

Kadir Anlayisli then stepped out of the cafe, on Berlin’s busy Karl Marx Strasse, and stopped the police van, telling the officers inside: “I have someone here you might be looking for.”

Police said there had been no struggle when Luka Rocco Magnotta was arrested at 14:00 local time on Monday.

Confronted by seven police officers, Luka Rocco Magnotta “tried at first giving fake names”, police spokesman Guido Busch said.

“But in the end he just said: <<You got me>>.”

Kadir Anlayisli recalled: “At first they [the police] asked him for an ID.

“Then they searched him. Well, then they showed me the <<thumbs up>> to show me that it was the right one. I was relieved.”

The suspect had reportedly worked as a bisexual porn actor and model.

Jun Lin, who was from Wuhan in China, had been enrolled as an undergraduate to study engineering and computer science at Concordia University in Montreal.

Zoya De Frias Lakhany, 21, a fellow Concordia student in some of Jun Lin’s classes, said he had been an excellent student who was shy and humble. She said she had cried all weekend after hearing about his death.

“He was happy here, he would take pictures of the snow and post them,” she recalled, quoted by AP.

“He was sweet, never complained and smiled all the time.”

Investigators say a video posted online, in which a man apparently uses an ice pick to kill another man, is believed to show Jun Lin’s murder.

Luka Rocco Magnotta faces charges in Canada of murder and threatening Canadian politicians.

Authorities believe body parts sent through the post belonged to Jun Lin. A foot was received by the headquarters of Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservative Party in Ottawa on 29 May. A hand was found on 29 May in a parcel addressed to the office of the Liberal Party in Ottawa.