Cannibal says his victim 'had a nice death'

The German cannibal who confessed to killing a man he met over the Internet and eating his flesh told his murder trial judges today: “I had my big kick and I don’t need to do it again,”

Armin Meiwes, 42, was making his closing statement. A verdict is expected on Friday.

He said his victim “came to me of his own free will to end his life.

“For him, it was a nice death.”

Still, he added that he now regrets the killing.

“I had my big kick and I don’t need to do it again,” he said. “I regret it all very much, but I can’t undo it.”

Prosecutor Marcus Koehler said today that Meiwes should spend life behind bars for murder.

He said he acted simply to “satisfy a sexual impulse” and filmed himself dismembering the victim before he ate him so he could “admire himself as a human butcher.”

Meiwes, Koehler said, considered eating his victim as a kind of twisted “communion.”

Defence lawyer Harald Ermel argued that the death was ”homicide on demand” - a form of mercy killing – because the victim had given his consent to be killed and eaten. That would carry a maximum five year prison sentence.

When his trial opened last month at the state court in the central city of Kassel, Meiwes confessed in detail to the March 2001 killing of 43-year-old Bernd Juergen Brandes at his home in the nearby town of Rotenburg.

He said Brandes, who travelled from Berlin after answering Meiwes’ Internet postings, wanted to be stabbed to death after drinking a bottle of cold medicine to lose consciousness.

A grisly video Meiwes made of the act was shown to the court in a closed session earlier in the trial.

A doctor testified that Brandes died from loss of blood and that the medication, along with a half-bottle of liquor and 20 sleeping pills he took beforehand, could not have lessened his pain.

Several experts have testified that Meiwes was fit to stand trial and was not mentally ill.

German police tracked down and arrested Meiwes in December 2002 after a student in Austria alerted them to a message Meiwes had posted on the Internet seeking a man willing to be killed and eaten.

“If I hadn’t been so stupid as to keep looking on the Internet, I would have taken my secret to the grave,” he said today.