Goettingen, Germany
The head of serial killer Fritz Haarmann has been incinerated after lying in storage for almost 90 years at a central German university, a newspaper reported on Saturday.
The medical department at Goettingen University told Saturday's Goettinger Tageblatt daily that it wanted to close a gruesome chapter in the history of science by getting rid of the head, which it said it had cremated and buried anonymously in the spring.
Frequent requests had been made in the past to bury the preserved head because it was no longer considered relevant to science, the report said.
It was once thought that criminals could be identified by the physiognomy of their heads, a field known as phrenology.
After Haarmann was beheaded in 1925 for the killing of at least two dozen young men from 1918 to 1924 in Hanover, his head was preserved in formalin and donated to Goettingen University. - Sapa-dpa