A Hannibal Lecter fan has reportedly confessed to caving in a fellow student’s head with a hammer before allegedly eating his liver.
A Vietnamese student identified as Nhat T., recently appeared for the first time in the district court of Gera in the German state of Thuringia, after allegedly admitting to killing his Chinese classmate Chenxi L.
The 27-year-old's body was found hacked to pieces and stuffed into plastic bags by police, his head found under a bridge, but the victim's liver had been removed with a sharp instrument and is now missing. Prosecutors believe the suspect might have eaten it given his great fondness of Hannibal Lecter.
The cannibalistic killer, who is the star of American psychological horror-thriller movies The Silence of the Lambs and Hannibal, was allegedly the 24-year-old suspect's "idol", and the prosecution claims he searched for the fictional murderer, as well as "psychological illnesses" and "secure killing methods", nearly 30,000 times before the murder.
Lawyer Christian Stuenkel, who represents the family of the victim, said: "Hannibal Lecter was the biggest idol of the accused. He watched all the films and series again and again."
"The film Hannibal definitely played a big role in the defendant’s life. The liver was selectively removed (from the body)," prosecutor Martin Zschaechner added, referring to a clip of the 1991 Oscar-winning movie The Silence of the Lambs, which sees the psychiatrist (played by Anthony Hopkins) say: "I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice chianti."
In August 2018, the Vietnamese student, who attended university in the central German city of Jena, gave himself up to the cops and allegedly confessed to killing his classmate on August 24 last year.
According to the prosecutors, Nhat T. lured Chenxi L. into his student flat by telling him that a package had arrived for him. He then turned up the music volume and struck him with a hammer, before allegedly hacking the body into pieces in the bathtub.
Investigators also suspect him of stealing the victim's computer and mobile phone and ordering costly goods on the internet using his money.
Nhat T was handcuffed as he was led into the courtroom, and hid his face in his hoodie, a move that has been compared in the press to Lecter obscuring his face with his trademark face mask.
Prosecutors suspect he might suffer from schizophrenia, and a mental assessment by a court psychologist has been ordered to discover more about the Vietnamese student's state of mind.
The trial is currently ongoing. It comes weeks after a woman who cut her husband's manhood off claimed that she acted out of revenge and didn't regret it at all.
