More than 40 years have passed since Issei Sagawa, nicknamed “Kobe’s Cannibal” for killing a Dutch student in Paris and then eating him, shocked the country and turned the murderer into a media phenomenon.
Sagawa died of pneumonia at the age of 73 on November 24, and his younger brother and a friend said in a statement that only relatives attended the funeral.
The memo was published by the publisher who published Sagawa’s memoirs written by his brother in 2019.
Issei Sagawa was a student at the Sorbonne University in Paris when he invited Dutch Renee Hartevelt to dinner at his house on June 11, 1981.
There, he shot her in the back of the head and raped her. Then he divided it into quarters and ate various parts of his body for three days. He took many pictures of the terrible crime.
He then tried to dispose of the remains from two abandoned suitcases in the Bois de Boulogne park on the outskirts of Paris.
A few days later, he was located and arrested, thanks to police asking witnesses for help.
“Eating that girl was an expression of love. I wanted to feel the presence of someone I loved inside of me,” he admitted after he was arrested.
Psychiatrists found him mentally ill and did not appear in court. He spent some time at an institution in France before being deported to Japan, where he was released in August 1985.
The Japanese authorities were never able to recover the files of their French forensic colleagues, considering that the case was closed, although they thought he did not need to be hospitalized. So Sagawa was free.
His transfer to Japan sparked anger in the victim’s family, who promised to put pressure on the Japanese public so that “the murderer is never released.”
Sagawa did not hide his guilt and capitalized on his reputation with a memoir called “In the Fog”, in which he detailed the murder.
He also talked about his obsession with cannibalism in several interviews and in the 2017 documentary “Caniba”.
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© Agence France-Presse
source: Noticias
Mark Jones is a world traveler and journalist for News Rebeat. With a curious mind and a love of adventure, Mark brings a unique perspective to the latest global events and provides in-depth and thought-provoking coverage of the world at large.