Advertisement 1

Magnotta all smiles following Berlin arrest

Article content

BERLIN

Luka Magnotta was all smiles and sporting sunglasses on the police-car ride to jail Monday after his arrest in the body-parts murder of ex-lover Jun Lin.

A police official told QMI Agency that Magnotta was silent except for one request - that police refrain from tipping off photographers who would be pining for a perp shot.

QMI Agency has also learned that it was a police instructor and five recruits who entered the cafe to nab the world's most wanted man.

The instructor, who only gave his name as Lilge, described the first few minutes after the high-profile manhunt ended inside the cafe in south-end Berlin on Monday afternoon.

The Canadian murder suspect was loaded into a police cruiser with tinted windows, but not before he put his sunglasses back on.

Officers said Magnotta smiled all the way to the holding cell at a police station in central Berlin.

"I do not know if he was smiling because he was happy that everything was over," Lilge said. "He didn't say a word all the way to the station."

Lilge said he had been walking down the street with his five students when a cafe owner approached him and said there was an important suspect inside his establishment.

"We had been walking through the streets for three or four hours," the officer said. "The students said it was a boring day. They didn't know they would have the case of their lives."

Lilge said Magnotta initially seemed nervous when they surrounded him at an Internet terminal.

"When I asked him for his name, he said his name was Kurt Trammel," Lilge said. "I asked him to show me his papers and he said didn't have anything. He began to tremble and his voice became nervous.

"He said he had come to Berlin to see a friend."

After a few minutes, Magnotta gave the officer his birth name, Eric Clinton Newman, before finally telling police that he was indeed Luka Rocco Magnotta.

One of the trainees, Sophie, said she was shocked to have taken part in the arrest of the world's most wanted man.

"We didn't believe that something like this could have happened in Berlin, especially during our training," the proud 22-year-old intern said.

Magnotta is sitting in a jail cell awaiting extradition to Canada on charges of first-degree murder.

Article content
Advertisement 2
Advertisement
Article content
Article content
Latest National Stories
    News Near Tillsonburg
      This Week in Flyers