German Cannibal Convicted Of Murder

A man who admitted killing and eating an acquaintance he met on the Internet was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison Tuesday, following his retrial in a case that engrossed and appalled Germany.

In announcing the verdict at the Frankfurt state court, presiding Judge Klaus Drescher described the killing as "a particularly perverse murder." Armin Meiwes, a 44-year-old computer technician, also was convicted of disturbing the peace of the dead.

"He acted out of self-seeking motives and has shown that, to this day, he does not regret his actions," Drescher said. Dressed in a gray suit, a despondent-looking Meiwes watched calmly as the verdict was read out.

During the first trial, Meiwes said Brandes asked him first to sever his penis — which the men unsuccessfully tried to eat.

A doctor also testified in the first trial that the video of the crime showed Brandes was still alive when Meiwes stabbed him in the throat hours later, despite the defendant's insistence his victim was already dead.

The retrial of Meiwes opened in January. It was held after a federal appeals court overturned his initial manslaughter conviction to allow prosecutors to seek a tougher sentence.

At the retrial, Meiwes renewed a detailed confession, telling the court his version of the grisly details of the March 2001 killing of Bernd Juergen Brandes at Meiwes' home in the central town of Rotenburg.

Meiwes said Brandes — who had traveled from Berlin after answering his Internet posting under the pseudonym "Franky" seeking a young man for "slaughter and consumption" — wanted to be stabbed to death after drinking a bottle of cold medicine to lose consciousness.

On Tuesday, the judge said Brandes could still have been saved at the time of the stabbing.

The doctor said Brandes died from loss of blood and that cold medication he took beforehand— along with half a bottle of liquor and 20 sleeping pills — could not have lessened his pain.

The defendant testified this year that Brandes, 43, had wanted to "be eaten alive."

"Otherwise, I would never have done it," Meiwes, who captured the killing on video, told the court.

Meiwes also maintained that Brandes had urged him to carry out further killings after his death.

Meiwes' lawyers had argued that the Frankfurt state court should instead convict him of the lesser offense of "killing on demand," on the grounds that he was only following his victim's wishes.

However, judge Drescher rejected that argument, ruling that Meiwes' main motive had not been to do what his victim wanted.

"He killed because he wanted the meat," Drescher said. The court also found that Meiwes killed to satisfy his sexual urges.

A court-appointed psychiatric expert, Georg Stolpmann, told the trial that he saw "significant danger of a repeat" offense by Meiwes.

Still, the defendant claimed he had hesitated before going through with the act.

"I wanted to eat him — I didn't want to kill him," he told the court.

Meiwes froze parts of the body and ate more after the killing.

Police tracked down and arrested Meiwes in December 2002 after a student in Austria alerted them to a message Meiwes had posted on the Internet seeking a man willing to be killed and eaten.

In early 2004, a court in the city of Kassel convicted Meiwes of manslaughter and sentenced him to 8½ years in prison, but prosecutors appealed the verdict.

Federal judges overturned the original ruling last year and ordered a retrial, arguing the lower court, in rejecting murder charges, failed to give sufficient consideration to the sexual motive behind the killing.

There was no immediate word on whether Meiwes would appeal Tuesday's ruling.

Meiwes has scored one legal victory, securing a ban by another court on the screening of a film that was inspired by his case.

Judges upheld his claim that the movie — titled "Rohtenburg," in an echo of his hometown's name — detailed events in his private life and infringed his personal rights.

By Inge Treichel