Dutch police have arrested a suspect in connection with the gruesome cold case murder of a wealthy Russian art dealer whose torso was found in a blue plastic bag in Amsterdam’s IJ River in 2013.
In a statement shared with the Guardian, police said they had arrested a 62-year-old man from Amsterdam on Tuesday after the suspect’s DNA allegedly matched traces found on the remains of Aleksandr Levin, an art dealer from St Petersburg who was 65 years old at the time of his killing.
Levin’s body, which had the head and limbs severed, was found by a passerby in the water near Amsterdam’s docklands across from the central train station at the end of January 2013.
But without access to the victim’s fingerprints or dental records, it took the Dutch police almost a decade to identify the remains as belonging to Levin, a breakthrough that came after it received a match of the victim’s DNA with a relative in Russia through the Interpol database of missing people.
The Dutch police on Tuesday did not disclose the identity of the suspect or the possible motive for the murder but said the methods used to dispose of Levin’s body pointed towards a premeditated killing.
Police said the suspect’s DNA was found on Levin’s torso and the “packing material” used to cover it up. They added that the suspect was living near the location where the body was discovered.
While there had previously been cooperation with Russian police over the investigation, the Dutch authorities said all contact with Moscow had been severed since the war in Ukraine.
Levin’s son said he was “thankful for the work of the Dutch police and everyone else who contributed to this arrest”.
“I would like to know who killed my father and what for. There are so many questions left unanswered,” the son, who asked for his last name to be withheld out of fear for his safety, added in a phone call with the Guardian from Russia.
According to a missing person report published by Russia’s investigative committee, Levin boarded a plane from St Petersburg to Amsterdam on 17 January 2013. He was supposed to take a plane the next day to the Spanish island of Gran Canaria but failed to show up for his flight.
Levin, who built a reputation in St Petersburg as a prominent dealer in Orthodox icons, had a shadowy past involving illegal art possession and trafficking.
He was first sentenced to 10 months in prison in the Netherlands in 1998 after police at Schiphol airport found in his possession a rare 18th-century atlas by the prominent cartographer Johannes van Keulen, which reportedly belonged to the Russian national library in Moscow.
The arrest in Amsterdam prompted the Russian police to search Levin’s apartments in St Petersburg where they reportedly discovered hundreds of stolen icons.
According to Fontanka, a St Petersburg-based outlet, police at one of the flats seized more than “600 stolen icons hidden in a secret room hidden behind a closet”. Fontanka said some confiscated icons were transferred to Russia’s Hermitage Museum and the St Petersburg Theological Academy.
After his release from jail in Amsterdam, Levin spent another two years in jail in Russia.
Despite the arrests, Levin seemed to have accumulated significant wealth over the years.
According to documents shared with the Guardian, Levin owned more than 10 properties in St Petersburg, including several houses in upmarket neighbourhoods of Russia’s second-biggest city.
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