Self-confessed German cannibal Armin Meiwes, who killed and ate a man he met through the internet, was on Tuesday given a life sentence after he was found guilty of murder.
The court found that the man, known as the cannibal of Rotenburg, had killed his victim to satisfy his sexual urges.
Meiwes (44) immediately signalled that he was going to appeal the sentence.
He had told the court in the western city of Frankfurt that his victim, an engineer from Berlin, had a death wish and begged to be killed.
The Frankfurt case marked the second time Meiwes had been tried for killing Bernd Juergen Brandes in Rotenburg in western Germany in March 2001. He was originally convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to eight-and-a-half years in prison in 2004.
But on appeal, a federal judge dismissed the sentence as too lenient and ordered a retrial on the higher charge of murder.
Meiwes, a computer technician, met Brandes after advertising on the internet for a ”slaughter victim” and invited him to his farm house.
The two men had sex before Meiwes severed Brandes’s penis, which they then fried and tried to eat. He later stabbed his bleeding, unconscious victim in the throat and cut away other parts of his body.
Meiwes admitted that he eventually ate some 20kg of Brandes’s flesh, accompanied by potatoes and a pepper or wine sauce, served on ”good crockery”.
His lawyers had argued that he was not guilty of murder but rather of the crime of ”killing on demand”, which carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison.
The case has exposed a hitherto secret underworld of cannibalism, which Meiwes claimed counts about 800 members in Germany. — AFP
