GERMANY: Self-confessed cannibal Armin Meiwes is facing a tougher sentence two years after he was found guilty of manslaughter and locked up for 8½ years for killing and eating a willing victim, writes Derek Scally in Berlin
Now Meiwes, a former soldier and computer expert, faces a retrial and a possible murder conviction in Frankfurt after a higher court ruled the sentence was too lenient.
The new trial will reawaken interest in a bizarre story that gripped Germany for a year, spurred a case of copycat cannibalism and is the subject of several upcoming films.
Meiwes's career as a cannibal began when he placed an internet advertisement looking for "well-built young men for slaughter". Among the many hoax replies was one that sounded genuine, from Bernd Brandes, a 42-year-old microelectronics engineer with Siemens in Berlin who said he wanted to be dismembered.
The two men swapped e-mails until March 9th, 2001, when Brandes - having sold all his possessions - took a day off work, met Meiwes and went back to his rambling farmhouse There, Brandes began drinking heavily and took painkillers. Then Meiwes mutilated him, later cut his throat and carved up the body in a specially constructed "slaughter room".
Over the coming months, Meiwes worked his way through 20kg of the body he had stored in the freezer, boasting in internet chatrooms of the killing. Another chatter informed the federal police who swooped on Meiwes's house on December 10th, 2002.
Since cannibalism isn't a crime in Germany, Meiwes was charged with "murder for sexual satisfaction", but it proved to be an unusual murder trial. The accused had eaten the evidence and videotaped the deed, including Brandes clearly saying he wanted to be killed and consumed.
The judge said the recording - what he called a warped "wedding video" - of Meiwes killing Brandes mechanically, "like a butcher", showed that he derived no pleasure or sexual satisfaction from the deed. Killing was a means to an end Meiwes sought by consuming human flesh, the judge said in his verdict, rejecting the charge of murder for sexual satisfaction. Since the verdict, he has been locked up in prison in the city of Kassel and has become a church-going prison library assistant.
Authors and screenwriters have been poring over a life-story straight from a psychological text book: abandoned by his father and two brothers as a child and left at home with a mother who dominated and humiliated him.
His lawyer, Harald Ermel, plans to ask the court to block the March opening of a German film based on the Meiwes story, the first of several cannibal features on the way.