Canadian cases involving dismemberment:

Luka Rocco Magnotta:

The former small-time porn actor, 29, graced front pages worldwide when packages containing hands and feet - mailed to political parties in Ottawa and schools in Vancouver in May this year - were allegedly connected with him.

He is accused of killing and dismembering Chinese student Jun Lin. A related video shows a man - identified by police as Lin - stabbed to death and cut up.

Magnotta was arrested in Germany when he was spotted reading about himself in an Internet cafe.

Labelled "a ticking time-bomb" by his family, Magnotta is allegedly the man behind kitten-killing videos from 2010, showing kittens suffocated in a vacuum bag and fed to a python.

He currently faces a first-degree murder charge.


Robert Pickton:

Known as the prostitute killer, Pickton, a pig farmer, was convicted on six counts of second-degree murder for killing six women.

He was originally charged with first-degree murder for killing and dismembering the women after luring them to his farm and promising them drugs and money.

He allegedly admitted to a police officer that he killed 49 women, and hoped to make it an even 50. DNA and remains of at least 33 women were found on his property.

He was sentenced in December 2007 to life in prison with no parole for 25 years. Twenty outstanding murder charges were stayed against him in 2010.


Kaneez Fatima, Muhammed Arsal Khan:

In December 1999, a woman named Mary Smith saw Muhammed Arsal Khan bury something in Colonel Samuel Smith Park. Later it turned out to be the chopped limbs of his five-year-old daughter, Farah.

Khan was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced for life, while Fatima was convicted of second-degree murder and is eligible for parole in 2015.

In a January 2000 video shown during trial, Khan is seen blaming his daughter during his interrogation: "The girl had committed the crime herself."

The defence at the time described Khan as a "narcissistic tyrant with a hair-trigger temper," in an attempt to get the charge reduced to manslaughter.


John Martin Scripps:

John Martin Scripps was the first Westerner executed in Singapore.

A convicted heroin smuggler, he left Britain in 1994, violating his parole. A year later, he was arrested for the murder of South African tourist Gerard George Lowe in Singapore.

He was also charged with the murders of two Canadian tourists, Sheila and Darin Damude, a mother-son pair from Victoria, B.C., vacationing in Thailand at the time.

Their dismembered bodies were found in an abandoned Phuket mine.

Passports and credit cards belonging to all three were found on Scripps when he was arrested.

He received the death sentence in 1995 after a guilty verdict over Lowe's death.


Issei Sagawa:

Sagawa eventually got off free after killing a Dutch student - Renee Hartvelt, 25 - in Paris and eating parts of her body.

In 1981, he shot Hartevelt in the head, then ate parts of her body, cutting and putting some away in his fridge for later.

He was caught after his attempt to dispose of the body parts in a large suitcase grabbed the attention of Parisians. In 1983, he was declared mentally unfit to stand trial.

Fifteen months later, his well-connected father brought him back to Japan, where he stayed a year in hospital and then left. His crime earned him interviews on television and celebrity status in Japan.


Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka:

Canada's most famous inmates, Paul Bernardo and his wife Karla Homolka served jail time for the murders of three girls, one of whom was dismembered and dumped in a concrete barrel in a lake.

Another was Homolka's younger sister, killed for Bernardo's pleasure.

Homolka made a deal to serve 12 years in exchange for her testimony. Graphic videotapes showing the murders later emerged, causing the agreement to be dubbed Canada's famous "deal with the devil."

Bernardo remains in prison, while Homolka walked free in 2005. She was last seen in June with a husband and children in Guadeloupe, an island in the Caribbean.