OTTAWA - The website YouTube that showed us air guitar impresarios, Diet Coke explosions, and nine months of gestation in 20 seconds, has helped catch a suspected killer, Canadian police said today.
Authorities in Hamilton, Ontario had posted surveillance video earlier this month on the popular website -in which users share video clips - hoping for help to identify two "people of interest" in a murder case.
The one-minute video shows two young men entering a local bar hours before two others were stabbed in a brawl outside after a hip hop music concert on November 17. One man died in the incident.
Last night, a 24-year-old suspect turned himself in to police, accompanied by his lawyer, and was charged with second-degree murder and attempted murder, police said.
"I suspect YouTube may have had something to do with his decision to turn himself in," Detective Sergeant Jorge Lasso said.
"A lot of people called us after seeing the video to give us information to help in our investigation."
YouTube and similar websites won superstar status in 2006, helping to transform the internet from a window on the world into a stage on which people play out the mundane and the bizarre in home-made video clips.
More than 100 million user-contributed video clips are viewed daily at the site, which was launched 18 months ago in San Bruno, California and bought for US$1.65 billion ($2.4 billion) by internet giant Google in November.
But this was the first case in which police used YouTube as an "investigative tool", Lasso said in an earlier interview.
"We decided to post a video on YouTube because we felt it would more likely be seen by the people who attended this concert, who are in their teens and early 20s," he said.
"I have children and they don't watch mainstream media, but they seem to be as informed as I am ... We realised that if we want to target this demographic, we'd have to go to the web, where they get their information."
Almost 16,000 people viewed the Hamilton police video online.
- AFP
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