A 41-year-old teacher accused of killing another man and eating the victim’s body to satisfy cannibalistic sexual desires, has gone on trial in Germany’s capital.
Prosecutors say the man on trial met his victim, a 43-year-old mechanic, on an online dating website a few hours before the September killing in 2020, the German news agency Deutsche Presse-Agentur reported. They said there was no indication the victim had agreed to be killed.
The accused, named Stefan R, sat in silence as the charges were read out. R is accused of killing 43-year-old Stefan T in the hope of consuming parts of the alleged victim’s body and deriving sexual satisfaction from the act.
His lawyers told the court that R did not wish to testify and sought to suspend the trial on the basis that the public prosecutor’s office had not made all the evidence in the case available to the court.
The sitting judge said the court would examine the matter and cancelled Thursday’s planned hearing. The trial will now continue next Tuesday.
The case was first uncovered last November after human bones were found in a park in the north-eastern Pankow district of Berlin.
On closer examination, police investigators identified the remains as belonging to the body of missing Berliner Stefan T.
After searching the victim’s phone, investigators were led to the house of the accused, where they found traces of blood, more remains and a set of suspicious work tools.
According to a reconstruction by investigators, the two men made contact via a dating website last September and met later the same day.
The accused was arrested immediately after the search of his property and has been held in custody since.
Other body parts are said to have been dispersed by the accused across Pankow, some of which were found in the days after his arrest.
The trial at a Berlin state court, which is expected to last until mid-October, is not the first of its kind in Germany.
In 2006, a German court convicted Armin Meiwes of murder and disturbing the peace for killing and eating a man he had met online. Meiwes is serving a life sentence.