Updated: 2:15 p.m. ET May 9, 2006
FRANKFURT, Germany - 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.
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 defendant testified 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 during the trial.
Meiwes also maintained that Brandes had urged him to carry out more killings after his death.
In convicting Meiwes of murder, the court found Tuesday that he killed partly to satisfy his sexual urges. A court-appointed psychiatric expert, Georg Stolpmann, testified that he saw "significant danger of a repeat" offense by Meiwes.
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.
Before Brandes was killed, the two attempted to eat parts of the man's body together, Meiwes said.
Meiwes froze parts of the body and ate more after the killing.
story at this link
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Updated: 4:35 a.m. ET Jan. 30, 2004
KASSEL, Germany - A German who confessed to killing, dismembering and eating another man was convicted Friday of manslaughter and sentenced to 8 1/2 years in prison.
A state court ruled that Armin Meiwes, a 42-year-old computer expert who met his victim on the Internet, had no "base motives" in the crime -- sparing him a murder conviction.
The first trial
