German Cannibalism runs rampant

Frankfurt - A German cannibal, who admits killing and eating a man five years ago, said in court on Tuesday that he still has daily fantasies about butchering humans.
"It's like a film that goes on in my mind," said Armin Meiwes, 44, at a re-trial in Frankfurt where prosecutors are seeking to upgrade his manslaughter conviction with eight and a half years' jail into a murder verdict and life imprisonment.
Meiwes said he gets the urge every time he sees a good-looking person on television or in a newspaper.
The court heard how Meiwes made a video of how he mutilated and then ate his victim, 43-year-old Berlin engineer Bernd Jürgen Brandes.
Meiwes said he wanted to document "the entire process from A to Z" in order to demonstrate that Brandes sacrificed himself willingly.
But he did not film himself eating his victim, saying this was because, "optically it was not possible to differentiate between the flesh you saw on the plate and animal food".
Ate 20kg
The case is being retried after an appeals court ruled the act had many hallmarks of a murder, regardless of evidence that Brandes volunteered to take part in it.
After butchering the remains, Meiwes said he cooked and ate about 20kg of the human flesh.
Meiwes told the court he had been worried about getting HIV/Aids from eating the meat from Brandes's corpse despite the fact that the two men had earlier had unprotected sex.
The killing was not carried out for sexual gratification as the prosecutors maintain, insists Meiwes.
He asserts his main interest was in cutting a man to pieces and eating him, not killing.
Meiwes had told the court he had met Brandes via the internet after advertising for a "slaughter victim" and that Brandes had repeatedly told him he must carry out his plan.
According to Meiwes, the two men met for the first time when Brandes arrived on March 9 2000 at the railway station in Kassel near Meiwes's country home.
He said Brandes's instructions were that he was to be killed once he became unconscious.
The defendant said he had prayed for God's forgiveness for himself and his victim just before cutting Brandes's throat that night.

Berlin - A man who was inspired by a high-profile cannibal case to kill and dismember a man he met on the internet was convicted of murder on Tuesday and sentenced to 13 years in prison.
The Berlin state court ordered Ralf Meyer, 41, into psychiatric care.
Meyer, who went on trial last week, had acknowledged killing Joe Ritzkowsky, a 33-year-old music teacher from Berlin who answered an internet solicitation for sadomasochistic sex.
Meyer "must be dealt with accordingly and locked away," presiding Judge Peter Faust said as he announced the verdict.
Meyer's defence team has said he was inspired by the case of Armin Meiwes, who was convicted in January 2004 in western Germany of killing and eating a man he met on the internet.
Corpse dismembered
In the Berlin case, Ritzkowsky's corpse was dismembered and parts were stored in Meyer's refrigerator in his apartment in the working class Neukoelln neighbourhood, but Meyer testified that, after the killing, he was too disgusted to actually eat the body parts.
"My biggest mistake was that I didn't go into psychiatric care at the right time," Meyer said in a closing statement to the court. He added that "I would like to apologise to the people who knew him, his friends and his mother".
Prosecutor Johannes Kroll had called for Meyer to be sentenced to 14 years and nine months. The defence asked that the sentence be limited to 10 years, saying he did not premeditate the killing.
Ritzkowsky was likely suffocated, but a doctor testified he could not be certain of the exact cause of death because the corpse was so badly mutilated.