Body-parts suspect will not challenge extradition

BERLIN // A pornographic actor suspected of killing and dismembering the body of another man told a Berlin judge yesterday that he would not challenge his extradition from Germany.

“He has been before the judge, who has confirmed the arrest,” a spokesman for the Berlin public prosecutor’s office said, the day after Luka Rocco Magnotta’s capture in the German capital following a days-long global manhunt.

“He said he would not fight the extradition.”

Magnotta, 29, was arrested on Monday at a Berlin internet cafe on suspicion of murdering a 33-year-old Chinese student in Canada last month with an ice pick and hacked apart his body while filming the grisly killing.

The case came to light after body parts were mailed to political party offices in Ottawa, triggering an international hunt that started in Montreal and moved to Paris before ending in Berlin.

The suspect would be moved from police detention to a jail cell later yesterday, said the public prosecutor’s spokesman, Martin Steltner.

German authorities have asked Canada to provide documentation for Magnotta’s extradition. As soon as it arrives, a judge will rule on sending Magnotta back to Canada, Mr Steltner said ahead of the hearing, adding that the procedure normally took several days.

“We will see what the extradition process will bring,” he said later, adding that it “will be easier and will be faster” now that Magnotta has said he would not fight it.

However he noted: “He could still change his mind.”

German police faced little resistance when they picked the suspect up in Neukoelln, a working-class district of the capital, after a witness tip-off.

He said simply, “You got me,” a police spokesman said.

A video from the cafe’s security camera circulating on German media showed police leading a suspect, wearing sunglasses and a hooded jacket and with his hands handcuffed behind his back, out of the cafe.

Before the hearing, Mr Steltner said there was no evidence the suspect had committed any crime in Germany and that investigators did not know exactly what he was doing in Berlin following his arrival on Friday by bus from Paris.

Initial reports said the victim, Lin Jun, was Magnotta’s lover, but Chinese media reports yesterday quoted Mr Lin’s friends as saying they were not in a relationship.