Man who ate a 'willing victim' denies murder

Armin Meiwes, 42, who is described by his lawyer as a "gentleman of the old school", has confessed to killing a Berlin man who answered an advertisement on the internet seeking a fit man "for slaughter".

Meiwes, who is being charged with murder because cannibalism as a crime does not exist in German statutes, denies the charge because he says that Bernd Brandes died of his own free will.

Meiwes has told prosecutors he had dreamed of killing and eating another human being since he was a schoolboy. It took him 29 years and 430 e-mails before Brandes became his willing victim at Meiwes’s farmhouse home near Kassel.

After the killing in 2001, he made contact with other people, including a man from London who made it into his house and was trussed up for "butchering" before he lost his nerve and declared: "I don’t really want to die."

Meiwes’s lawyer, Harald Ermel, said that it took the victim nearly ten hours to bleed to death and that he had repeatedly urged Meiwes to keep on cutting him.

Meiwes cut up the body and stored parts in his freezer. "He believes he ate about 20 kilograms and there were about ten kilograms left over," said Mr Ermel. "He defrosted it little by little and ate it."

Police arrested Meiwes more than a year later, in December 2002, after a tip-off from someone who had spotted another of his adverts on the internet.

Mr Ermel said Meiwes chatted about cannibalism with at least 280 like-minded people on the internet.

Meiwes told Welt am Sonntag that he had eaten his victim as he wanted to make him part of himself, a desire he had satisfied and that would not recur.