VANITY WAS HIS DOWNFALL: He filmed the murder, posted footage of the gruesome act on the Internet and was arrested while reading about himself

A Canadian porn actor suspected of murdering and dismembering a Chinese student and mailing his body parts to Canada’s top political parties was reading about himself on the Internet when he was arrested at a cafe in Berlin, Germany.

Canadian investigators say 29-year-old Luka Magnotta’s obsessions led him to post Internet videos of his killing kittens, then a man, and finally to his arrest at the cafe where he had spent two hours reading media coverage of himself.

An international manhunt set off by a case of Internet gruesomeness that captured global attention ended quietly on Monday in the working-class Neukoelln district of the German capital when a cafe employee recognized Magnotta from a newspaper photo and flagged down a police car.

Confronted by seven officers, “He tried at first giving fake names but in the end he just said: 'You got me',” said police spokesman Guido Busch. “He didn’t resist.” 

Magnotta is wanted by Canadian authorities on suspicion of killing Jun Lin, a 33-year-old man he dated, in Canada, and mailing his body parts to two of Canada’s top political parties before fleeing to Europe.

They say Magnotta filmed the murder of the Chinese student in his Montreal studio apartment and posted it online.

The video shows a man with an ice pick stabbing another naked, bound male. He also dismembers the corpse and performs sexual acts with it in what police called a horrifying video.

The warning signs apparently were already there.

For nearly two years animal activists had been looking for a man who tortured and killed cats and posted videos of his cruelty online. Since Lin’s murder, Montreal police have released a photo from the video which they say is of Magnotta.

In 2005, Magnotta was accused of sexually assaulting a woman, but the charges were dropped, the lawyer who represented him at the time said.

Magnotta is believed to have fled to France on May 26, based on evidence police found at his apartment and a blog he once posted about disappearing.

In Germany, police spokeswoman Kerstin Ziesmer said Magnotta is being questioned, and will be brought before a judge behind closed doors.

The case’s full horror emerged when a package containing a severed foot was opened at Canada's ruling Conservative Party headquarters on May 29.

That same day a hand was discovered at a postal facility, addressed to the Liberal Party.

And a torso was found in a suitcase on a garbage dump in Montreal, outside Magnotta’s apartment building.

Police in masks combed through the blood-soaked Montreal studio apartment last Wednesday.

As they unravelled his background, police discovered that Luka Magnotta changed his name from Eric Clinton Newman in 2006 and that he was born in Scarborough, Ontario. He is also known as Vladimir Romanov.

Toronto lawyer Peter Scully said he represented Magnotta in a fraud case in 2004 and a sexual assault case in 2005. He said Magnotta was charged with a dozen counts of fraud and impersonation for using a woman’s credit card to buy about $17,000 worth of goods, including a television, DVD player and several cellphones.

He said he pleaded guilty to four fraud-related charges after serving 16 days in pre-trial custody.

He received a nine-month conditional sentence and a year of probation.

Scully said Magnotta was charged with sexually assaulting a woman in 2005, but the prosecution decided to withdraw the charges. The woman’s father became so irate and threatening that Scully said he wrote a letter to police and the prosecutor, telling them about it.

Scully remembered Magnotta as soft spoken and polite.

“I’ve had lots of creepy characters and Eric did not stand out as one of them,” he said. Scully refers to his client by his previous name, Eric Newman.

But Nina Arsenault, a Toronto transsexual who said she had a relationship with Magnotta over a decade ago, described him as a drug user with a temper, who sometimes turned his anger on himself, hitting himself on the head, and other parts of his body.

While Magnotta described himself in an online video interview with a site called “Naked News” as a stripper and male escort, Lin, who was from Wuhan, China, was registered as an undergraduate in the engineering department and computer science at Concordia University in Montreal.

Police have confirmed Magnotta is a porn actor and that he and Jun had a relationship.

Zoya De Frias Lakhany, 21, a fellow Concordia student in some of Lin’s classes, said he was an excellent student who was shy and humble.

She said she cried all weekend about her classmate's death.

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

Montreal Police Cmdr. Ian Lafreniere said investigators are 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,” said Lafreniere. “He was recognized because his photo was everywhere.”