the guardian
Prosecution: Luka Magnotta ‘a man on a mission’ who carefully planned crime
- Ex-model had mailed body parts to political parties and schools
A Canadian former porn actor has been found guilty of first-degree murder on Tuesday in a case in which a Chinese student was killed and dismembered in Montreal in 2012.
Luka Magnotta, 32, had admitted to killing engineering student Jun Lin, 33, but pleaded not guilty on grounds of mental illness.
Magnotta was also found guilty of committing an indignity to a human body, publishing and mailing obscene material, and criminally harassing Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper and other members of Parliament.
The prosecution had argued that Magnotta was “a man on a mission” and had carefully planned the killing.
The verdict came on the eighth day of jury deliberations.
The jury was shown a video of the killing that Magnotta had posted online. It included a soundtrack and was entitled One Lunatic, One Ice Pick.
The prosecution said that six months before the killing, Magnotta had emailed a British journalist to say he planned to kill a human and make a movie of it.
The jury heard that Magnotta, a gay escort, had been hospitalised in 2001, and had sought psychiatric help about a month before Lin’s death. Magnotta’s father, who testified at the trial, also has a medical history of schizophrenia.
The case gripped Canada in the spring of 2012 after body parts were found in the trash behind a Montreal apartment building and in packages mailed to political parties in Ottawa and to schools in Vancouver. The boxes contained hands and feet wrapped in pink tissue paper as well as notes and poems.
The victim’s father, Diran Lin, traveled from China to attend the trial.
Magnotta fled to Europe after the killing and was arrested in a Berlin internet cafe, where he was reading about himself.