MONTREAL – Police investigating the grisly killing of a Chinese student said Wednesday that mailed packages containing the man's body parts also included notes.
The case was discovered last week when Jun Lin's left hand and left foot were mailed to Canada's top political parties. The investigation spread to the other end of the country this week as more body parts were mailed from Montreal to two schools in Vancouver. Those parcels contained a right hand and a right foot, and police said they would conduct DNA tests to confirm a match, Montreal Police Cmdr. Ian Lafreniere said.
"They were the same limbs we were looking for," Lafreniere said. The victim's head is still unaccounted for.
Lafreniere said the parcels mailed to the Conservative and Liberal parties, and at least one of the Vancouver packages contained a note. He declined to say to whom they were addressed, or what they said, for fear of encouraging copycat crimes.
Lin's lover, porn actor Luka Rocco Magnotta, 29, was arrested in Berlin on Monday and could be extradited to Canada by the end of the week.
Lafreniere said Magnotta had either lived in Vancouver or passed through there at one point, but could not otherwise say if he had a connection to those two schools. In 2003, Magnotta worked on a porn movie for a company that was based in Vancouver, according to Jeff Vanzetti, webmaster for the U.S. based Internet Adult Film Database. It was not immediately known if the movie was filmed in Vancouver, however.
Investigators say Magnotta videotaped the killing and dismemberment in his apartment and posted it online. The video also shows the suspect eating parts of the body, police said. A copy of the video viewed by The Associated Press did not show anyone eating the body but did show a man using a fork and knife on it. Police suggested they have access to more extensive video of the killing, possibly an unedited version.
Magnotta was caught at an Internet cafe in Berlin after evading police for days while he partied in Paris. He has told German authorities he would not fight extradition.
German authorities are waiting on Canada's formal extradition request, Martin Steltner, a spokesman for Berlin prosecutors, said Wednesday. The Canadian Embassy in Berlin declined to comment on when Ottawa may file the official papers seeking extradition.
Magnotta arrived in Berlin on Saturday on a bus from Paris and stayed with a friend, or someone he met on the Internet, for two nights before he was captured, Steltner said. Investigators in Germany were looking for more information on the person.
Lafreniere said they saw video Wednesday that the suspect might have made while on the run.
Lin's parents, meanwhile, arrived in Montreal from China late Tuesday and met with investigators and officials from Concordia university on Wednesday, said Zheng Xu, a press spokesman at the Chinese consulate. Lin, 33, was registered as an undergraduate in the department of engineering and computer science.
Yan Shi, the head of Concordia's Chinese student association, met the family and described the painful scene at the airport when they arrived Tuesday.
"It's heartbreaking," Yan Shi said. "Lin's mother was very emotional. She was crying all the time ... She could barely walk. We had to help her."
Cmdr. Denis Mainville, the head investigator of the Montreal police major crimes unit, said investigators will review hundreds of homicide cases over the last 30 years throughout Quebec for any possible links to Magnotta. Mainville said such a review is routine in such cases.
Meanwhile, DNA tests have confirmed that the body parts mailed to the Conservative and Liberal parties were Lin's remains, police said, and they have footage of Magnotta mailing the two parcels that were sent to Ottawa.
Police concerns about copycats grew Wednesday after a fake foot, made of rubber, was found in a Montreal street. Lafreniere said it looked very realistic and probably had been used in movie production.
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Gillies contributed from Toronto. Associated Press writers Phil Couvrette in Ottawa, Ontario, David Rising in Berlin and Jeremy Hainsworth in Vancouver, British Columbia contributed to this report.