GERMANY: 'Cannibal' Police officer arrested after allegedly killing and eating man he met on cannibalism website

• The victim, 59, had “fantasised about being murdered and eaten by someone else since his youth”

The house where police believe the suspect ate a portion of his victim

A detective has been arrested over a gruesome ‘cannibal’ murder after the hacked-up body of a man he met on the internet was found in his garden.

The suspect, 55, has admitted murdering his victim after the pair chatted online on a dark website for people obsessed with cannibalism, German police said today.

The victim, 59, had “fantasised about being murdered and eaten by someone else since his youth,” Dresden police chief Dieter Kroll said.

When the business consultant, from Hanover, went missing, police began a search and weeks later tracked his path using his communications with the suspected killer.

The pair met on November 4 and within hours the victim was dead, police said.

Dresden head of criminal investigations Maik Mainda said: “They did not know each other personally until then.”

The two men met at Dresden railway station, east Germany, and drove to the suspect’s house in the town of Hartmannsdorf-Reichenau.

When police caught up with the suspect on Wednesday, he admitted slashing the victim’s throat, officers said.

Mainda said: “The agreement was that the killing should take place immediately. The suspect then used a knife to cause a life-threatening wound on the throat of the victim, which led to his death.

“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.”

Killer and victim had extensive email, text and telephone contact since October to arrange their fatal date.

Detectives believe the suspect, a handwriting analysis expert, spent five hours torturing the victim before dismembering his body and burying him.

They are now probing whether he ate parts of the body before putting them in the ground.

The case echoes that of Armin Meiwes, dubbed the “Cannibal of Rothenburg”, who, in 2001, killed and ate a man who had advertised on the internet for someone to kill him “and leave no trace”.

Meiwes filmed the killing and was jailed for life in 2006.

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