Cannibal jailed for life for murder

A man who admitted killing an acquaintance he met on the internet was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison today, following his retrial in a case that engrossed and appalled Germany.

Armin Meiwes, a 44-year-old computer technician, also was convicted of disturbing the peace of the dead.

His lawyers had argued that the Frankfurt state court should instead convict him of the lesser offence of “killing on demand”, on the grounds that he was only following his victim’s wishes.

The retrial of Meiwes opened in January.

It was held after a federal appeals court overturned his initial manslaughter conviction to allow prosecutors to seek a tougher sentence.

At the retrial, Meiwes renewed a detailed confession, telling the court his version of the grisly details of the March 2001 killing of Bernd Juergen Brandes at Meiwes’ home in the central town of Rotenburg.

Meiwes said Brandes, who had travelled from Berlin after answering his Internet posting under the pseudonym “Franky” seeking a young man for “slaughter and consumption”, wanted to be stabbed to death after drinking a bottle of cold medicine to lose consciousness.

He testified that Brandes, 43, had wanted to “be eaten alive”.

“Otherwise, I would never have done it,” Meiwes, who captured the killing on video, told the court during the trial.

Meiwes also maintained that Brandes had urged him to carry out further killings after his death.

Still, the defendant claimed he had hesitated before going through with the act.

“I wanted to eat him. I didn’t want to kill him,” he told the court.

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.

In early 2004, a court in the city of Kassel convicted Meiwes of manslaughter and sentenced him to nearly nine years in prison, but prosecutors appealed the verdict.

Federal judges overturned the original ruling last year and ordered a retrial, arguing the lower court, in rejecting murder charges, failed to give sufficient consideration to the sexual motive behind the killing.