Canadian police today named a man with a bizarre internet trail as an alleged kitten-killer and bisexual porn star as their suspect in a gruesome case involving a dismembered torso and mailed-out body parts.
Montreal police released a photograph of Luka Rocco Magnotta, who also uses the pseudonyms Eric Clinton Newman and Vladimir Romanov, and asked people across Canada to help locate him.
A man identified as Luka Rocco Magnotta appears on several Internet sites, with photos that match those of the man in the police mug shots.
The sites make references to Mr Magnotta as the man shown in Internet videos allegedly suffocating kittens and feeding one to a python.
Other websites describe Mr Magnotta as a male model and a bisexual actor in adult films.
"Police have never witnessed a crime scene such as this," Montreal police commander Ian Lafreniere said after investigators searched an apartment at an undisclosed Montreal
location.
In the first gory discovery in the case, a severed foot was mailed to the headquarters of the governing Conservative Party in Ottawa.
A hand was intercepted in the mail, also in Ottawa.Then a torso was found in a suitcase in a garbage pile in Montreal.
"As a father, I would have trouble sleeping at night knowing that the suspect was in my neighborhood," Mr Lafreniere said.
He said Mr Magnotta and the as-yet-unidentified victim knew each other but offered no details.
He said Mr Magnotta was not previously known to police and he declined to comment on what social media said about him.
The blood-stained package containing a decomposing foot arrived on Tuesday at the Conservatives' offices in downtown Ottawa, a few blocks away from parliament in the country's safest city.
"It was such a horrible odour I'm sure many of us will not forget it," said Fred DeLorey, a Conservative Party spokesman.
Police intercepted a second suspicious package at an Ottawa postal depot. It contained a human hand.
Meanwhile in Montreal, a janitor, curious about an abandoned suitcase in a pile of garbage, opened it to find a headless torso inside, with no arms or legs.
"We're missing parts of the body so it's difficult for us at this time to identify the body 100 per cent," Mr Lafreniere said.
Reuters