Meiwes is reportedly working with a television production company on a documentary about his life.
Ahead of the trial, Meiwes filed requests with US and German courts for an injunction to block the release of a US feature film he claims is based on his case, saying the movie could prejudice his retrial. State prosecutors have argued that it is crucial the German justice system ensure that a "highly dangerous defendant" is not eligible for release as early as 2008.Ī verdict is expected in March.
The so-called "cannibal of Rotenburg" had 16 computers and 2,000 disks full of information about the secret world. Meiwes's case has blown the lid open on a underground scene of sex and extreme sado-masochism that the defendant told investigators is thriving. "That is a taboo for which I must justify myself before God and the whole world." "I saw the killing as helping him, helping him to die, helping him to kill himself," he said.
Meiwes, who could take the stand as early as Thursday afternoon, told the court during his first trial that he saw the encounter as the fulfillment of a shared fantasy. The computer service technician was sentenced to eight and a half years in prison. The case did not come to light until an Austrian student spotted another Internet advertisement by Meiwes seeking new victims and alerted the police. After Meiwes and the victim jointly attempted to eat the victims severed penis, Meiwes killed his victim and proceeded to eat a large amount of his flesh. He later ate two-thirds of it, often with accompaniments such as pepper sauce or a wine sauce and potatoes. Armin Meiwes is a German former computer repair technician who achieved international attention for killing and eating a voluntary victim in 2001, whom he had found via the Internet. He dissected the corpse, slicing off 30 kilograms (66 pounds) of flesh, which he stored in a freezer. Meiwes, now 44, stabbed Brandes and hung his body from a hook on the ceiling of his kitchen. "Driven by sexual lust, he laid him on a bench to be slaughtered," Koehler said. The two men had sex and after Brandes downed sleeping pills and whiskey, Meiwes cut off the man's penis, which they planned to eat together but found it was inedible "even when fried".Īfter a while, Brandes became unconscious.
He was one of more than 200 volunteers.īrandes, who had a will, bought a one-way rail ticket to Meiwes's storybook hometown of Rotenburg, where his host picked him up at the station and took him to his rambling half-timbered farmhouse.
Detlev Günzel, 58, had cut the body into small pieces in a slaughter chamber he built in his cellar, before burying them in his garden. "The defendant stands accused of murder for sexual gratification," Koehler told the three-judge panel before describing the grisly events of a night in March 2001, which Meiwes captured on videotape.Ī 43-year-old Berlin engineer, Bernd Juergen Brandes, met Meiwes after replying to an Internet advertisement for "young, well-built men aged 18 to 30 for slaughter". A former police officer convicted of murdering a willing victim he met on a website for cannibalism fetishists and chopping him up in an S&M chamber was convicted again on Tuesday in a re-trial. He greeted his three-member legal team with a broad smile and handshakes, then listened impassively as state prosecutor Marcus Koehler made his opening statement.