OTTAWA—A webcam may have captured the murder of a Chinese student while she was chatting online with a friend overseas, Canadian police said Monday.
An assailant was seen through the lens of the webcam struggling with the 23-year-old woman in her basement apartment near York University in Toronto at about 1 a.m. (0500 GMT) Friday, hours before her body was discovered by police.
The online witness in Beijing told police there had been a knock at the door. A man in his 20s with a muscular build and medium-length brown hair asked the victim to use her cellphone.
Suddenly, a skirmish erupted. The witness saw part of it, but some of the action took place out of the camera’s scope. The man then turned off the laptop computer, which is now missing.
Police said there were no signs of “substantial trauma” to the body that could identify the cause of death, nor any “obvious” signs of sexual assault. However, she was unclothed from the waist down.
An autopsy was scheduled for this week.