MONTREAL — A man who posted a graphic video of Lin Jun’s 2012 killing online and then evaded police for months has finally been arrested and charged with corrupting morals — a rarely used article of the Criminal Code.

“This is a guy who basically lives out of a rental car with a laptop,” said Edmonton Police Staff Sgt. Bill Clark in an interview Wednesday, the day after his force finally caught Mark Marek while he was in town for some medical treatment.

“We were always several months behind him,” Clark said. “We’d get an address for him then find out he stayed there just three weeks, or he might stay at the odd hotel.”

Clark described Marek as an “odd individual” who “is of the opinion that the Holocaust didn’t happen.”

Marek, the 38-year-old owner of bestgore.com, is detained and has a bail hearing scheduled in Edmonton court Thursday morning. Police believe he posted the video knowing that it depicted a real killing.

Luka Magnotta, 30, who is alleged to have made the video and sent it to Marek, was arrested in Berlin last June after Lin’s body parts were discovered in Montreal, Ottawa and Vancouver. He faces several charges, including first-degree murder, and is scheduled to go on trial in September 2014.

Clark said Marek had a large sum of American money on him when he was arrested and “didn’t seem to be hurting.”

“He seemed to have a lot of websites and sold ads on them until PayPal cut him off,” Clark said. “It’s stuff that is demeaning against women and he says he has 10 million followers at times.”

A note on the bottom of Marek’s website says, “Please don’t send me any emails — I can’t read them. I had my laptop confiscated by police state Canada and with it all existing emails and the means to read new ones.”

In an online chat about the video with the Ottawa Citizen in May 2012, Marek said he “had no proof ... that it was 100 per cent real.”

He also defended his website as “the rawest reality you can get, uncensored.”

Marek told the Ottawa Citizen he believed “people need to know what really is going on in their neighbourhoods,” saying: “They could easily walk upon a gruesome accident scene themselves and whom will they blame for being exposed to it then?”

He said at the time that he had previously worked in information technology for the government before getting laid off.

Marek has no criminal record. If found guilty of this first offence, he would face a maximum sentence of two years.

Lin, 33, was a Chinese national studying at Concordia University at the time of his killing.

Jana G. Pruden of the Edmonton Journal contributed to this report



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