How 'Mr Nobody' was unmasked as a Romanian fraud

After he walked into a Toronto hospital claiming he had been mugged and was suffering amnesia, Canadian police knew him only as Mr Nobody.

British police were asked for help after linguistics experts identified the man's accent as certainly the Queen's English as spoken by a one-time public schoolboy.

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But, finally, faced with evidence gathered by journalists, Mr Nobody has admitted he was born Ciprian Skeid in Timisoara, Romania, 36 years ago.

Piecing together his life, the US edition of GQ magazine reports in its June issue that Skeid's first disappearance came as a young man when working as a cook in Germany and was asked to send money home.

'He flew into a rage and his family never heard from him again,' a friend told the magazine. 'His mother went into a decline and died of her suffering in 2000.'

From Germany, Skeid moved to Paris on a temporary visa. There, a male friend supported him - Skeid said work was against his principles.

Told to find a job, he left for London on a French passport in the name of George Lecuit, later reported stolen.

He worked as a masseur at a gay bathhouse. Londoners who met Skeid say he is a conman whose sexual identity is as malleable as his name.

Sean Spence, who edited a gay magazine which twice featured 'Lecuit', said: "I think he's a fraud trying to hide a dodgy past."

How Skeid arrived in Toronto - where he said all he knew was that he was born in 1975 and christened Philip Staufen - is still a mystery. But amid a worldwide outpouring of sympathy, he was granted Canadian social assistance and housed by individual Good Samaritans touched by his hard-luck story.

Later, he married the pretty daughter of a successful lawyer and moved to Portugal.

Confronted by GQ and shown a copy of his real birth certificate, Skeid insisted he had suffered a 'very real breakdown' and does not recall how he came to be in Canada.

Claiming his father, who died in 2002, was a violent drunk, Skeid said: "I came from Romania, a place I loathe. My family had nothing. My mother didn't have the courage to leave the crazy man who ruined her life. My life could justify acts much worse than those attributed to me.

"I'd rather be a fake nobody than the real me. At first I tried not to be anyone at all. Then I tried to become someone. And then someone better."