A self-confessed cannibal who killed and ate a man he met on the internet has said he deeply regrets his crime and would not have done it if his victim had not wanted to be eaten.

Armin Meiwes, 44, speaking in a Frankfurt prison in his first interview since he was jailed for 8½ years in January 2004 for manslaughter, appeared calm and contrite. The prosecution has appealed against his conviction and he is due to go on trial again this week for murder.

“I understand and regret deeply what I did, but the victim wanted me to do it,” insisted Meiwes, a former soldier and computer repair man. “Otherwise I would never have touched him.”

Apparently unwilling to prejudice his own retrial, Meiwes declined to reveal whether he would carry out a similar act again. He said he would have preferred it if his victim, Bernd Jürgen Brandes, 43, a homosexual computer engineer, had killed himself.

But Günter Stampf, a German film maker who conducted the interview, said Meiwes had admitted he still had fantasies about cannibalism and was struggling to contain them.

“He built up a fantasy world on the internet and then it suddenly became real,” said Stampf, who has visited Meiwes in jail on several occasions. “He is fighting against those fantasies and wants therapy. He wants to start a normal life afterwards.”

German police estimate there are 8,000-10,000 people in their country who fantasise about eating a person or being eaten and are attracted to websites devoted to the practice.

Meiwes took Brandes to the specially constructed killing room of his rambling timbered farmhouse in Rotenburg, in western Germany, in 2001 after Brandes posted a message in the chatroom of one such site.

He insists his victim consented to the gruesome chain of events that began with both men trying to eat Brandes’s penis — first raw and then fried — and ended with Meiwes laying out the corpse on a butcher’s bench and chopping it into pieces.

Meiwes, who recorded the deed on videotape, ate 44lb of his victim’s remains in the following months, defrosting pieces portion by portion. He kept the skull in a freezer and buried other parts in his garden.

Even as he ate his way through Brandes, barbecuing some parts and following gourmet recipes for others, Meiwes continued to advertise for other victims. It was not until December 2002, after he was reported to the police by an Austrian student, that he was arrested.

“I am preparing intensively for my trial,” said Meiwes, who has become a keen churchgoer and believes the spirit of the dead man lives on through him. “I have my files, which are copious, and I’m reading them. I have three good lawyers and I am calm, relaxed and very confident.”

After his trial brought him worldwide attention, Meiwes rejected substantial offers from film companies and publishers, instead assigning the global rights to his story to Stampf’s Hamburg-based company, Stampfwerk, for no charge on condition it gave a full and accurate account of his case. “I want to explain what made me do this and I want to warn other people,” he told Stampf.

Meiwes, who works in the prison library, is writing a diary that will form part of his memoirs, due to be published this autumn. Stampf’s company is also working on a documentary. He said the BBC and HBO, the American cable television channel, had expressed interest.

But Meiwes said he was unhappy about an American-made film — Butterfly, a Grimm Love Story — which he claims is so closely based on his case that it may prejudice his trial.

His lawyer said he was taking legal action in Germany and America to prevent the release of the film in March. It stars Thomas Kretschmann, who played the ship’s captain in King Kong, and Keri Russell, who is to appear in Mission: Impossible III. Atlantic Streamline, a California-based film production company which made the film, was not available for comment last week.

Stampf said Meiwes was also taking action against a British website that posted three images from his video of the killing.

“Before I met him I thought, ‘Jesus, what’s going to happen?’ But my first impression of Mr Meiwes was that he looked and behaved very normally,” said Stampf. “He spoke in a very normal, clear way about something that is beyond most people’s imagination. He smiles quite a lot.”

Stampf said he had been surprised to learn Meiwes went to the prison chapel every Sunday. “I asked him how he could do this if he was a Christian and he doesn’t really have an answer for that.

“He said he imagines, rather like the South American cannibal tribes, that the person you have eaten lives on in you. He said he didn’t want to cause his victim any pain or even to kill him. Killing was something terrible to him.”

Meiwes, who has a cell of his own, also claimed to have a good relationship with his fellow inmates, and came across as harmless to people who met him, Stampf said. “His lawyer has even said he would allow him to look after his children.

“All the people who’ve met him, the people he worked with, the psychiatrists who have examined him, don’t have the impression that he’s a dangerous person, that he’s some kind of crazy serial killer.”

At the first trial, the prosecution sought a murder conviction but failed to obtain it, apparently because, even though the crime was premeditated, the victim had given his consent. Psychiatrists have found Meiwes deeply disturbed but sane.

Professor Arthur Kreuzer, a leading criminologist, predicted the case might end at Germany’s constitutional court. “This case is unique,” he said.

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