Chinese police on Friday detained a male suspect who allegedly murdered a young Canadian model in Shanghai earlier this week.

Chen Jun, 18, was arrested in Langxi County, Xuancheng City in eastern Anhui Province at about 8:15 a.m., a Shanghai Municipal Public Security Bureau spokesman said. Langxi is about a few hundred kilometers west of Shanghai.

Police found a laptop and other articles that belonged to the victim Diana O'Brien, a 23-year-old from Saltspring Island, British Columbia, who was found stabbed to death early on Monday in her apartment building in Shanghai's Changning District.

Chen confessed he followed O'Brien to her apartment on Sunday night for a planned robbery. The woman resisted and he killed her.

Chen then fled to Huzhou City of eastern Zhejiang Province after the murder and robbery, and then to Xuancheng, the police spokesman said.

O'Brien entered China on June 24. She had worked for a Shanghai-based modeling company, JH Model Agency.

The case was being further investigated, the spokesman said.

An on-line description of JH said it was "one of the leading modeling agencies in the East of China for over 100 models" and "all of them come from different countries."

JH couldn't be reached for comment and its official website www.jh-model.com remained inaccessible on Friday.

 (Xinhua News Agency July 11, 2008)