(Reuters) - A Canadian man suspected of murdering and dismembering a Chinese student, then posting a video of the crime online, was arrested in an internet cafe in Berlin on Monday after an international manhunt.
Interpol had issued a "red notice", the highest type of warning, for Luka Rocco Magnotta, who faces first degree murder charges for killing the student. He is later believed to have mailed his victim's body parts to political parties in the Canadian capital Ottawa.
"A 29-year-old man wanted by Interpol was arrested early this afternoon in an internet cafe in the Neukoelln district," a Berlin police spokesman said.
The owner of the cafe, Kadir Anlayisli, told Reuters Television: "I wasn't sure if it was him but then I looked at some pictures and thought, that is definitely him. He spoke French, said 'monsieur' and wanted to use the internet and I said hello."
Magnotta is believed to have entered France on May 26, and French police had been investigating thousands of reported sightings.
They alerted German police this morning that he was headed for Berlin on a Eurolines coach, a French police source said. "He should have known that there are identity checks when you travel by coach," the source said.
The 29-year-old has left a bizarre internet trail as an alleged kitten-killer and bisexual porn star.
In a crime scene Montreal police say is the worst they have seen, his 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.
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.
Anlayisli, the cafe owner, said he had read about Magnotta and recognized his face. He then stepped out of the cafe, stopped a passing police van and told them, "I have someone here you might be looking for."
"I have a good memory for faces," he said, pointing out to reporters the narrow internet booth with high imitation-wood divides in the cafe's dark interior where Magnotta sat.
Magnotta is now being held at a Berlin police station. Interpol red notices require that the suspect be held under arrest pending extradition.
The cafe is on Neukoelln's Karl Marx Strasse, a busy shopping street running through the multi-cultural south-Berlin district, which is home to Turkish and Lebanese cafes.