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A person in custody has implicated himself in the death of Etan Patz, the six-year-ancient boy whose disappearance 33 years ago on his way to school helped launch a missing children’s movement that place kids’ faces on milk cartons.

New York City Police Department Commissioner Raymond Kelly said in a statement that further details would be released later Thursday.

An unidentified law enforcement official told The Associated Press that the suspect was picked up late Wednesday in Camden, N.J., and has been tied to the case in the past. The person spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the ongoing probe by the FBI and police into the boy’s disappearance.

Etan Patz was one of the first missing children to appear on a milk carton. His disappearance helped launch a national movement on the issue of missing children. The date May 25 was declared National Missing Child Day in his honour. (Keith Bedford/Reuters)

At the time of the boy’s disappearance, the man in custody lived in the same Manhattan neighborhood as Patz. He had been known to detectives for years, but it was unclear what brought them back to him this week.

The man was being questioned Thursday by the Manhattan District Attorney’s office and investigators are still trying to confirm details of his tale.

The development came one day before the anniversary of the boy’s disappearance, when detectives traditionally receive a landslide of hoaxes and fake leads related to the case.

Wearing a backpack, the boy with sandy hair and a toothy smile vanished May 25, 1979, while walking alone to his school bus stop for the first time, two blocks from his home in New York’s SoHo neighborhood.

There was an exhaustive search by police and a crush of media attention. The boy’s photo was one of the first of a missing child to appear on a milk carton. Thousands of fliers were plastered around the city, buildings canvassed, hundreds of people interviewed. SoHo was not a neighbourhood of swank boutiques and galleries as it is now, but of working-class New Yorkers rattled by the news.

The April excavation of a Manhattan basement yielded no obvious human remains and small forensic evidence that would help solve the decades long mystery of what happened to the boy.

His parents, Stan and Julie Patz, were reluctant to go or even change their phone number in case their son tried to reach out. They still live in the same apartment, down the street from the building that was examined in April. They have endured decades of fake leads, and a lack of hard evidence.

The family did not immediately return a message requesting comment.

“I hope this is the end of it,” said Roz Radd, who lives a couple of blocks from the Patz family and knows Etan’s mother casually from walking dogs in the neighbourhood. “There’s going to be hopefully closure to her, to know what happened to her son.”

Jose A. Ramos, an admitted child molester, was dating Etan Patz’s babysitter at the time the boy disappeared. Ramos denied killing the child, but in 2004 a Manhattan civil judge ruled him to be responsible for the death. (Pennsylvania Department of Corrections/Associated Press)

Etan’s disappearance touched off a massive search that has ebbed and flowed over the years. It also ushered in an era of anxiety about leaving children unsupervised.

In the past, the case seemed to have been largely focused on Jose Ramos, a convicted child molester, now serving time in Pennsylvania, who had been dating Etan’s baby sitter at the time the boy disappeared. In 2000, authorities dug up Ramos’ former basement on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, but nothing turned up.

Stan Patz had his son declared legally dead in 2001 so he could sue Ramos, who has never been charged criminally and denies harming the boy. A civil judge in 2004 found him to be responsible for Etan’s death, largely because he did not contest the case.

More recently, the focus had shifted to a 75-year-ancient Brooklyn resident, though he was not named a suspect and denied any involvement. In 1979, he was a handyman who had a workspace in the basement where the April excavation occurred.

A person familiar with the investigation said the emergence of a suspect was not related to the search of the basement.

Police in Montreal went in on student protesters again Wednesday night, kettling them and making 518 arrests — the largest number in one night since the demonstrations started weeks ago.

There were also mass arrests at student protests in Quebec City and Sherbrooke.

The majority of those arrested in Montreal will face fines, police said. Some will be charged under the Criminal Code.

In Quebec City, police arrested 176 people under the provisions of Quebec’s controversial new protest law, known as Bill 78.

The demonstration was declared illegal because protesters refused to give police their route in advance, one of the provisions of the new law.

Under Bill 78, those arrested can face a minimum fine of $1,000 for a first offence.

The students are marching against the Quebec government’s plot to raise university tuition. For more than three hours Wednesday, a crowd of thousands walked peacefully through the streets, and then the situation changed quickly.

“This is the 30th night of the protest,” one woman told CBC’s Tom Parry. “Can you imagine what’s going to happen when there’s summer festivals? … We’re going to keep marching. It’s not going to stop. Negotiations have to happen.”

The Quebec government has offered to return to the bargaining table, but it won’t give in on the tuition hike or on another student demand that it scrap its controversial new emergency law that clamps down on protests.

Protesters snaked through the streets for more than three hours before police kettled them.

Kettling is a police tactic widely used in Europe where riot police surround demonstrators and limit or cut off their exits. It has been widely criticized because it often results in the scooping up of innocent bystanders as well as rowdies.

A recent report by Ontario’s police watchdog blasted Toronto police for their use of kettling during the G20 summit two years ago, saying they violated civil rights, detained people illegally and used excessive force.

Officers’ ‘physical integrity’ in jeopardy

Const. Daniel Lacoursiere of the Montreal police said officers were in danger and had to act.

“Their physical integrity was in jeopardy,” he told CBC News. “That’s why all these arrests were made at the corner of St-Denis and Sherbrooke.”

Riot squad officers had been marching on the sidewalk beside the front of the protest all evening. An order to disperse was given when protesters arrived at Sherbrooke Street, because police had been pelted by projectiles and other criminal acts had been committed, Lacoursiere said.

The group had also apparently resisted going in a direction ordered by police.

Those arrested could face charges under municipal bylaws or the Criminal Code.

Photographer pushed to ground

The swift police action squeezed the mob together tighter and tighter as the officers advanced and some people begged to be let out, pleading they were bystanders. One photographer was seen to be pushed to the ground and a piece of equipment was heard breaking. Some protesters cursed and yelled at provincial police officers, who ignored the taunts.

Riot officers stood impassively around the corralled demonstrators, feet planted and batons clutched in gloved hands. On a nearby street, a Quebec provincial police officer was seen snapping a rod topped with the flag of the hardcore anti-capitalist Black Bloc and tossing it between two parked cars.

Police on horseback also provided reinforcement as officers sorted out the crowd.

Emmanuel Hessler, an independent filmmaker who had been following the march for a few blocks, said in a telephone interview with The Canadian Press from inside the police encirclement that he was surprised by the action, saying, “Suddenly, there were police all around us.”

Released from detention

Some of those arrested in Montreal were taken to the police’s eastern operation centre, where they were processed and released Thursday morning.

Several people who emerged bleary-eyed from the detention centre said they were bewildered by what had happened to them.

They said the march was unfolding peacefully when all of a sudden they were cornered by police at the intersection of Saint-Denis and Sherbrooke streets. They said they were made to wait for several hours and read their rights en masse.

One protester leaving the detention centre said he was issued a $600 ticket.

He described the police action as heavy-handed as officers were ordering the demonstrators to leave, but were blocking the way out.

With files from The Canadian Press

The Canadian government’s plans for its bill to give law enforcement greater powers over consumer internet information may be on hold, but a consumer group isn’t giving up the fight against lawful access.

Open Media, which has helped lead the backlash against bill C-30, is releasing an online ad about the proposed law Thursday morning.

The bill would force internet and telecommunications service providers to install equipment to collect information on customers in case police obtain a judicial warrant to retrieve it.

The ad says C-30, also known as the lawful access, online spying or warrantless wiretapping bill, will let the government make profiles of internet users and allow online use to be traced back to the user. It also says the information will be more vulnerable to hackers and that consumers will end up paying for the cost of the equipment needed for companies to implement the legislation.

The ad was prompted when Public Safety Minister Vic Toews refuted a news report last week that said the government wouldn’t go ahead with the bill.

Conservative government spokespeople have repeatedly refused to say when the bill will go to committee for study. The legislation has been tabled in the House but not been debated since a massive public backlash the week it was released on Feb. 14, more than three months ago.

Conservatives allowing for changes

A spokeswoman for Toews declined to respond to the points laid out in the ad and pointed instead to the government’s plot to allow major changes to the proposed law.

“Bill C-30 will be sent to committee prior to second reading for a discussion on how to best protect Canadians from online crime while respecting the privacy of law-abiding Canadians,” Julie Carmichael said in an email.

Parliamentarians can’t make major changes to proposed legislation at the usual committee stage, so Toews and Prime Minister Stephen Harper conceded they’ll allow a House committee to study the bill sooner than usual.

Police, intelligence and Competition Bureau officials would be able to obtain customer names, addresses, telephone numbers, email addresses, internet protocol (IP) addresses, and a local service provider identifier.

Police officials have denied that they will be able to see the content people have accessed and say they therefore can’t “track” people with this data.

But Chantal Bernier, assistant privacy commissioner of Canada, said that according to her office’s technologists, the six easily obtainable types of subscriber data are enough information to identify a person and track where he or she goes online.

With files from CBC News