A German cannibal who admitted killing and eating a man he met over the internet was convicted of murder and sentence to life in prison today after a retrial that has kept Germany engrossed.

Armin Meiwes, a 44-year-old computer technician, was originally convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to eight years' jail over the killing in March 2001 of Bernd Juergen Brandes.

But that verdict was overturned by an appeals court to allow prosecutors to seek a tougher sentence.

In the retrial, which started in January, Meiwes's lawyers argued that the Frankfurt state court should instead convict him of the lesser offence of "killing on demand" - which carries a maximum sentence of five years - on the grounds that he was only following his victim’s wishes.

Instead, Meiwes was found guilty both of murder and of "disturbing the peace of the dead".

Meiwes met Brandes, 43, from Berlin, after advertising on the web for a young man for "slaughter and consumption" and invited him to his farmhouse in the town of Roteburg.

The two men had sex before Meiwes severed his victim's penis, which they then fried and tried to eat. He later stabbed his bleeding, unconscious victim in the throat and cut away other parts of his body.

Meiwes admitted that he eventually ate some 20kg of Brandes’s flesh, accompanied by potatoes and a pepper or wine sauce, served on "good crockery".

But he testified that Brandes had wanted to die and had asked to be stabbed after drinking a bottle of cold medicine to lose consciousness. "Otherwise, I would never have done it," he said.

Legal arguments in the case have revolved around whether this was murder or the lesser crime of "killing on demand".

But what fascinated both the German press and public was the testimony in which Meiwes revealed his obsessions and lifted the lid on an underworld of cannibalism which Meiwes claims counts about 800 members in Germany.

Meiwes has told the court that he now regretted killing Brandes and has apologised to his victim’s boyfriend. But he has remained unrepentant about eating his flesh, saying it was the "ultimate kick" both of them were seeking.

Psychologists told the court that Meiwes was a mentally sane, if lonely, man who held down a steady job. Meiwes himself has said his cannibal fantasies began in his childhood, when his father abandoned his family, and he dreamt of eating one of his school friends so that somebody would stay with him forever.

He has also said that from his prison cell he still fantasises about killing people when he saw attractive young bodies on television or in magazines.

"I find this extremely worrying," state prosecutor Annette von Schmiedeberg told the court last week. He videotaped his meeting with Brandes, in what prosecutors said was a bid to make sure he could watch it again later to satisfy his fantasies.

The case inspired a US-made horror film Butterfly, A Grimm Love Story, which Meiwes succeeded in blocking on privacy grounds.

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