German cop arrested over cannibalism website murder

BERLIN - A German police officer has been arrested on suspicion of murdering a man whom he met on an Internet site for cannibalism fetishists, authorities said Friday.

The 55-year-old had confessed to slashing the throat of his willing victim and then cutting his body into small pieces and burying them in his garden, police said.

But there was no evidence that the suspect, identified by media as police officer Detlev G. of the eastern state of Saxony, had eaten any of the body parts of his victim, prosecutors said.

The victim, a 59-year-old man from Hanover, Lower Saxony, had "since his youth fantasised about being murdered and eaten," Dresden police chief Dieter Kroll told a press conference.

When the Hanover man, a business consultant, went missing, police began a search and weeks later tracked him down using his electronic communications with the suspected killer, whom he met on November 4.

"They did not know each other personally until then," Dresden head of criminal investigations Maik Mainda told the press conference, saying they had extensive email, SMS and telephone contact since October to arrange their fatal date.

The two men met at Dresden railway station, from where the suspect drove his visitor back to his house in the town of Hartmannsdorf-Reichenau.

"The agreement was that the killing should take place immediately," Mainda said.

The suspect "then used a knife to cause a life-threatening wound on the throat of the victim, which led to his death," he said.

"The suspect has told us that he then cut the victim into separate pieces, including many very small pieces, and that he also cut through bones. The suspect then buried the body parts on the sloping lawn of his property."

The suspect was cooperating and had pointed investigators to the sites where he buried the remains, police said.

In 2001, German cannibal Armin Meiwes made international headlines for admitting to killing, mutilating and eating the flesh of a lover whom he had met on the Internet via an advertisement looking for a "slaughter victim".

Meiwes was originally convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to eight and a half years in prison in 2004, but another court found him guilty of murder in a retrial and jailed him for life.