Berlin - "Are you max 30 years old, with a normal body, then you are just right for me. I want to slaughter you and consume your delicious flesh.
"Please reply with details of age, height and weight, preferably with photo. Your master butcher, Franky."
"Franky," the self-confessed German cannibal who wrote the above online ad, did indeed meet a victim ready to be killed, sliced and eaten.
It's not the kind of advertisement most people would respond to. But on the Internet, where it was posted, someone did.
| It is hard 'distinguishing between fantasy and reality' when it comes to the more morbid sites |
The case, which came to light last week, has shocked Germany and exposed the dark side of the web where the rule is that there are no rules.
Sex on the Internet is well known. But cannibalism? It's out there too.
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One particular web forum has an explicit board containing messages such as from Diana, looking for "an experienced butcher" for "conventional slaughter" at her home.
A man offers to get rid of women aged up to 40 who have become "useless and a burden." Other visitors offer to sacrifice a foot, a hand or an ear.
There is no way of telling whether such demands are merely fantasies that will never become real. In the vast majority of cases, they probably never do. But they did with "Franky," the alleged cannibal Armin M. from Rotenburg, near Kassel in central Germany.
| 'People should ask themselves what they like about it' |
"There are millions of websites, thousands of chat and news groups," said Dirk Buechner of Germany's federal criminal police bureau BKA.
"The law (in Germany) does not forbid publication of fantasies except when they involve children."
He said that for the 20 BKA officers charged with monitoring the Internet, usually for child pornography or neo-Nazis, it is hard "distinguishing between fantasy and reality" when it comes to the more morbid sites.
It can be even harder policing such sites when their host Internet service providers are based halfway around the world.
"People have all sorts of strange fantasies out there," said Paul Douglas, editor of the British-based .net Internet magazine.
"Whatever sort of person you are, chances are you can find somebody else on the Internet who shares your hobbies or tastes."
He said that while the Internet was not to blame for somebody's behaviour, it provided a channel of communication to other like-minded people that would be impossible in everyday society.
With a series of security measures such as passwords, protected emails and encrypted messages, it can be virtually impossible to determine who is saying what to whom, why and where.
Police only stumbled on the Rotenburg cannibal case more than a year after the death of the victim, a computer technician from Berlin named by police as Bernd Juergen B.
Even then, it was only because someone alerted them after seeing a new set of online adverts by Armin M to which five people had replied.
As police continued to search his property, they took his barbecue grill for forensic examination on Tuesday, they promised to turn an "increased focus" on such web forums.
Still, for anyone reasonably conversant in Internet technology, or just by typing a few key words into a search engine, it's easy to stumble across sites and forums offering gore: pictures of dismembered bodies, shotgun suicides, a woman chewing a foot ...
German criminologist Rudolf Egg said it reflected on society as a whole.
"People should ask themselves what they like about it, why they do it and what that actually reveals of their personality and their sexual frustrations in society." - Sapa-AFP
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