POLICE have arrested a man as part of their investigation into the murder of an illegal immigrant whose body was dumped in a North Yorkshire canal.

The Press understands a man in the York area has been quizzed by detectives in connection with the killing of Chinese national Cai Guan Chen.

His corpse was discovered in Selby Canal, near the A19 between Burn and Brayton, almost four months ago by an off-duty policeman who was fishing the stretch of water.

The 38-year-old victim had been living in the UK illegally since 2001 and had also used the fake name Bing Lin.

It took almost six weeks after the discovery of his body for him to be named as detectives searched for clues as to his identity and where he came from.

North Yorkshire Police would today not talk about the arrest.

A force spokeswoman said: “Police do not wish to make any comment at this stage as to do so would compromise the investigation, which is currently ongoing.”

But The Press has been told that a man has been arrested in the York area and subsequently questioned.

In April, officers swooped on a semi-detached house in Heslington Lane, which local residents said had been under surveillance by the investigation team for some time, possibly since the discovery of the victim’s body Since then, there have been no publicised developments in the police investigation into how the man, who had suffered severe head injuries, was killed.

Police believe the victim may have been in the river for two or three weeks before his body was discovered on March 20.

In the wake of the discovery of Mr Guan Chen’s body, they launched a television appeal and a multi-lingual poster campaign for information, together with a computer-generated image of what he might have looked like.

Appeal posters were handed out in Asian communities in North, South and West Yorkshire, Humberside and Liverpool, Manchester and London, with oriental businesses – including restaurants and supermarkets – displaying the posters in their windows which had an appeal for information in Mandarin, Cantonese, Korean and Vietnamese. It is thought Mr Guan Chen lived in numerous locations around the UK and that his last known address was in London.

The discovery of his body happened the same weekend as police launched a search for missing York chef Claudia Lawrence, landing North Yorkshire Police with two of its biggest cases in years.