THE longest-running horror show in modern German legal history, the stomach-churning trial of Armin Meiwes, the Cannibal of Rotenburg, ended yesterday with a clear verdict: a life jail term for murdering a man in order to eat his organs.

As the Frankfurt judges pronounced sentence, Meiwes swayed, nodded, briefly flashed his notorious teeth at the bench and then disappeared through a concealed door to begin a sentence that is expected to last about 15 years.

Behind him he left grisly, graphic images of the perverse nether-world of cannibalism that has been haunting Germany since he was first put in the dock in 2003. Because his victim had expressed a wish to be eaten, an initial trial found Meiwes, 44, guilty of “killing on demand” — equivalent to manslaughter — and jailed him for 8½ years. That was too mild, the appeals court ruled, and a retrial was ordered.

Yesterday the judges accepted the prosecution case that there was clear evidence that Meiwes’s motive was sexual and went beyond his victim’s wish to die. It was official: cannibalism is murder.

“You wanted to record a film in your head, a hit film,” Marcus Koehler, the state prosecutor, said, “a film that you could play again and again so that you could satisfy yourself sexually.”

The judges, who had heard detailed accounts of how Meiwes first severed his victim’s penis before both men sat down to eat it with a dash of garlic, accepted this argument. They also found Meiwes, who later stabbed his victim in the throat, guilty of desecrating the dead.

But Meiwes, a computer technician and a former army sergeant major, disputed this version in both trials. Eating a man, he said, had been a way of bringing him closer to his brother who had moved out of the family home. Meiwes presented himself as a lonely, confused child under the thumb of a domineering mother.

It was when his brother left home that Meiwes started to grill Barbie dolls and shape marzipan into the form of human limbs.

His cannibal fantasies became reality when he started to surf internet chat rooms and discovered Bernd Juergen Brandes, a computer software specialist from Berlin, who declared himself ready to be eaten. “It was not a sex thing,” Meiwes said. “Every bite I took of him, brought me closer to my brother.”

Harald Ermel, the cannibal’s lawyer, said yesterday that he would be appealing against the sentence. The panel of judges had ignored how the internet had changed the situation of victims and perpetrators, Herr Ermel said. Since Herr Brandes wanted to be eaten, and since his willingness could be proven by e-mail traffic, the cannibal had simply conducted a mercy killing, which carries a maximum sentence of five years.

The Frankfurt judges not only dismissed this idea yesterday but also underlined the possibility that Meiwes could commit the crime again. Soon after killing Herr Brandes in March 2001, Meiwes was on the internet looking for new victims. “Bernd told me he did not want to be left alone in the deep freeze,” the cannibal said.

His ambition was to feed himself entirely from human flesh and vegetables grown in the garden of his rundown house in the village of Rotenburg.

In his final courtroom speech he declared: “I don’t need to do it anymore — but I do believe everyone should be able to decide what he wants to do with his own body.”

Legal experts said yesterday that his appeal was unlikely to succeed. The chances are strong that the life sentence will be interpreted as 15 years and that the past 3½ years of detention will be deducted from the jail term. Meiwes should then be free at the age of 55.

How he is treated by prisoners in the meantime remains to be seen. “It may be that he is regarded as the lowest of the low in the prison hierarchy, along with the child molesters,” Professor Lorenz Boellinger, a leading criminal psychologist, said. “It is not likely that he will receive therapy in jail, though he is obviously in need of it.”

So far fellow prisoners have left him alone, especially at meal times. He will be given a job in the prison library, rather than the kitchens.

A TASTE FOR HUMAN FLESH

The Broadcasting Standards Commission upheld viewers’ complaints about a 1998 cookery show in which celebrity chef Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall served a woman her own afterbirth. The meal, shared with friends, included placenta pâté on focaccia bread

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