Cannibal tells of his desire to eat flesh

GERMAN CANNIBAL Armin Meiwes, serving life for killing and eating a Berlin engineer in 2001, says he was 10 or 11 when he experienced the first urge to eat human flesh.

In his first television interview, Meiwes said that from a young age he considered consuming someone as the ultimate form of human intimacy.

“I could never build up closer contact to people who meant something to me,” he said in the interview, broadcast last night in Germany.

“Rather than say, ‘I love you’, I would have had to say, ‘I’d like to cut off a slice of you’.”

Meiwes met his victim, Bernd Brandes, through an internet advertisement looking for a “well-built 18- to 30-year-old to be slaughtered and consumed”.

The two men met just once, in March 2001, at Meiwes’s home in Rotenburg, north of Frankfurt.

Brandes, who had travelled from Berlin, was sexually aroused by the idea of being consumed, Meiwes said, and wanted to get down to business straight away.

“I, on the other hand, wanted to get to know him for a week, I didn’t want to give him the death bite immediately,” he said.

After dismembering Brandes, the Berliner bled to death in the bath; Meiwes waited for him to stop breathing, reading a Star Trek novel.

He then cut up the body, eating a portion of Brandes’s back first, and storing the rest in his household freezer.

The killing was, he said, the fulfilment of a childhood wish. “I was 10 or 11, I saw Sandy from the television series Flipper and imagined how nice it would be to have him in me,” said Meiwes. “I think that, at this age, my wish to be a cannibal was already well-developed.”

The case came to light in December 2002 after Meiwes bragged about it on the internet.

In January 2004, Meiwes was convicted of manslaughter and given an eight-year sentence.

State prosecutors seeking a tougher sentence demanded a retrial; two years later, he was given a life sentence for murder.

After the police made contact with him, Meiwes immediately contacted his sister-in-law to say he was facing investigation.

“She asked me, ‘Armin, have you a body in the cellar or what?’ “I said: ‘No, in the freezer’.”

The interview coincided with the German release yesterday of Rohtenburg, a film based loosely on the Meiwes case that was banned for three years.