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CRIME

Wannabe German cannibal committed

A court in the eastern German city of Cottbus has committed an aspiring teenage cannibal who tried to bite a woman’s throat to permanent psychiatric care.

Published: 15 April 2008 15:24 CEST
Wannabe German cannibal committed
Photo: DPA

The 19-year-old man from Berlin had such powerfully violent fantasies that he bit a 26-year-old youth centre employee on her neck to “eat from her flesh” last summer. He also attacked two men at two juvenile homes where he was living. In one incident he injured a social worker with scissors and licked the man’s blood off the floor.

“The accused expressed abnormal sexual and cannibalistic fantasies from age 15 and said he wanted to eat human flesh and blood,” presiding Judge Sigrun von Hasseln said on Tuesday.

Prosecutors had charged the man – who counts Germany’s infamous Cannibal from Rothenburg as a personal idol – with attempted murder, attempted manslaughter and grievous bodily harm and wanted to imprison him for four years.

ddp/dpa

CRIME

Teenager turns self in after attack on German politician

A 17-year-old has turned himself in to police in Germany after an attack on a lawmaker that the country's leaders decried as a threat to democracy.

Published: 5 May 2024 12:52 CEST
Teenager turns self in after attack on German politician

The teenager reported to police in the eastern city of Dresden early Sunday morning and said he was “the perpetrator who had knocked down the SPD politician”, police said in a statement.

Matthias Ecke, 41, European parliament lawmaker for Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrats (SPD), was set upon by four attackers as he put up EU election posters in Dresden on Friday night, according to police.

Ecke was “seriously injured” and required an operation after the attack, his party said.

Scholz on Saturday condemned the attack as a threat to democracy.

“We must never accept such acts of violence,” he said.

Ecke, who is head of the SPD’s European election list in the Saxony region, was just the latest political target to be attacked in Germany.

Police said a 28-year-old man putting up posters for the Greens had been “punched” and “kicked” earlier in the evening on the same Dresden street.

Last week two Greens deputies were abused while campaigning in Essen in western Germany and another was surrounded by dozens of demonstrators in her car in the east of the country.

According to provisional police figures, 2,790 crimes were committed against politicians in Germany in 2023, up from 1,806 the previous year, but less than the 2,840 recorded in 2021, when legislative elections took place.

A group of activists against the far right has called for demonstrations against the attack on Ecke in Dresden and Berlin on Sunday, Der Spiegel magazine said.

According to the Tagesspiegel newspaper, Interior Minister Nancy Faeser is planning to call a special conference with Germany’s regional interior ministers next week to address violence against politicians.

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