German police officer arrested over killing

A German police officer has been arrested on suspicion of killing and chopping up a man he met on the Internet who had long fantasised about being killed and eaten, authorities said today.

The handwriting and document analysis specialist was arrested on Wednesday at his workplace, the Criminal Technical Institute in the eastern city of Dresden, authorities said.

He told investigators that he fatally stabbed the victim in the throat on November 4, hours after the two met in person for the first time.

The 55-year-old said he then chopped up the body into multiple pieces. The suspect pointed officers to a number of places around his property, south of Dresden, where he had buried the remains, city police chief Dieter Kroll said at a televised news conference.
 

The killing happened about a month after the pair first met in an Internet chatroom, police said. The 59-year-old victim, whose name was not released, travelled about 400 kilometres by bus from Hannover to the meeting.

Police started looking into the case when the victim was reported missing November 11 by a colleague. Two days later, witnesses told officers that "the missing man had fantasised since his youth about being killed and eaten by another person," Kroll said.

There is no indication at this point that the suspect ate body parts, and the suspect denied having done so, prosecutor Lorenz Haase said.

"He said that his victim wanted to be killed and he fulfilled this wish," Haase said in a telephone interview.