GERMANY: Mr Armin Meiwes, the defendant in a case involving cannibalism, has told his trial that he would have killed and eaten other victims had police not arrested him last year.
"I hope I will soon find another victim, the flesh is almost all gone," he wrote in an e-mail to a friend read out in court yesterday. The e-mail was sent months after he had killed Bernd Brandes (43), an electronics engineer from Berlin, and stored 20 kilos of his flesh in a freezer.
Mr Meiwes boasted of the killing in an Internet chat room, after which an Austrian student informed the police. Mr Meiwes was arrested exactly a year ago, but denies the charge of "murder for sexual gratification" and insists Brandes wanted to be killed and eaten.
"I regarded the killing as an act of support, as euthanasia, aiding suicide," said Mr Meiwes in testimony on the second day of his trial yesterday. "That is taboo, and that is why I have to justify myself to God and the whole world."
The packed press and public galleries of court D103 in Kassel, central Germany, were emptied yesterday while 12 people, including the trial judge, three jury members and lawyers, viewed a disturbing video tape showing, with time lapses, the last 10 hours of Brandes's life beginning on March 9th, 2001.
The tape begins with the mutilation of Brandes, and ends with him lying down in what Meiwes called his "slaughter room".
Brandes is heard mumbling inaudibly before Mr Meiwes plunges the knife into him. Mr Meiwes told the court: "He said: 'Put me out of my misery'."
Prosecutors are pushing for a life sentence for murder - cannibalism is not expressly illegal in Germany - but defence lawyers are calling for the lesser charge of "killing on demand" which carried a sentence of up to five years.
The men met after Mr Meiwes posted an Internet advertisement looking for "young well-built men for consumption".
State police said they found over 1,800 images on Mr Meiwes's computer of other people with cannibal fantasies he had met.
"Dentists, teachers, cooks, civil servants; the clientele was from across the board," said Mr Willfried Fehl, from the Hesse state criminal police division.
He said the so-called "slaughter room" contained a butcher's apron, plastic bowls and a wooden cross on the wall.
The case is expected to continue until late January.