Cannibal Reveals Man-Eater Network

January 7, 2004
From The Times' Roger Boyes in Kassel

ARMIN Meiwes, the increasingly confident Cannibal of Rotenburg, has been helping police unravel an international network of man-eaters.

From Austria to the US, willing victims going by names such as Hansel and Gretel queued up to be eaten by or at least exchange butchering details with the 42-year-old former soldier.

The chilling groundbreaking trial in Kassel, now in its fourth week, on Monday exposed not only the scope of modern cannibalism but also Mr Meiwes's deluded ambitions for a world in which eating people could solve problems of famine and over-population.

Police witnesses told of two "truckloads" of printed emails and internet exchanges between Mr Meiwes and the web of cannibals or potential victims.

Detective Isolde Stock said: "We downloaded over 3800 photographs from his computer."

Mr Meiwes, whose courtroom interventions are now as confident as those of the prosecutor, simply sneered at the evidence: "How much of that was really relevant?" he said.

The sheer volume of evidence has taken the court by surprise. Mr Meiwes had earlier talked of a cannibal network of at least 800 people across the spectrum of German and European society, including dentists and teachers. He admitted being in contact with 400 people.

But after a year's investigation, the police have managed to track down only 200 of those. They include an American who was looking for a victim to chop into three segments and then dine on, and a German who wanted to be eaten around the table on Russian Orthodox Christmas.

The police would not have been able to dig so deeply into the man-eating maze without Mr Meiwes's co-operation. This may explain his easy, almost off-hand manner, openly chuckling as some of his explicit email conversations were read aloud by judge Volker Muetze.

The explicit internet traffic between Mr Meiwes and cyberfriend Joerg showed they both felt they were on the edge of something of global significance.

Joerg says in one internet exchange: "Hey, we seem to have discovered a market niche."

As they chat on the computer, messages responding to Mr Meiwes's advertisement for a young man to eat start to pour in; a dozen in the course of an evening's internet exchange.

Mr Meiwes's most remarkable fantasies are not sexual or culinary but megalomaniacal.

He tells Joerg that cannibalism should be propagated as a form of development aid: "We could solve the problem of over-population and famine at a stroke."

Despite the evidence, court observers see the case tilting slightly towards Mr Meiwes.

The internet transcripts reveal a man uninterested in killing, only in eating freshly slaughtered people. The prosecution has to prove that the victim, Bernd Brandes, was murdered for sexual motives.

The Australian

http://news.com.au/common/story_page/0,4057,8340267%5E401,00.html