“Cannibal” Issei Sagawa died – the horrific crime in Paris in 1981 that shocked

Issei Sagawa, the so-called “Japanese Cannibals»On charges of killing and eating a Dutch student in 1981 in Paris, he died at the age of 73.

His crime caused terror all over the world.

Sagawa died on November 24 of pneumonia, and his funeral was actually held with only his relatives in attendance, according to a statement from the publisher of his brother’s biography, Jun, published in 2019. She added that no public ceremony was planned. Advertising.

Heinous crime in the French capital

The Issei Sagawa He was a student in Paris at the Sorbonne when, on June 11, 1981, he invited fellow Dutch student Rene Hartevelt to dinner at his apartment.

There he killed her by shooting her in the neck with a carbine and raping her, before dismembering her and eating various parts of her corpse over the course of three days.

“Eating this girl was an expression of love. I wanted to feel inside me the presence of someone I love,” he said after his arrest.

He was arrested, but did not go to jail

Diagnosed with mental illness by experts, he was not convicted and held in France and then Japan before regaining his freedom in August 1985.

The star of the “Japanese cannibal” …

Issei Sagawa has become a media star and hosted many reporters in his apartment in a suburb of Tokyo. He had appeared on Japanese television several times and published best sellers such as Cannibal or I’d Like to Eat, and he also drew a manga (Japanese comic) telling about his crime.

Japanese writer Goro Kara won the Akutagawa Literary Prize in 1982 for his crime novel The Letter of Sagawa.

“It’s just my imagination”

Two anthropologists made a documentary about him in 2018 called “Caniba”, in which Issei Sagawa claimed he was unable to “explain” his actions.

“It’s just my imagination. I can’t say anything more specific,” he said in the film. “People must think I’m crazy.”

He said he found it impossible to contain his “obsession”, adding, “I wanted to eat lately, more than anything else in the world.”

Brother Cannibal supports self-mutilation

The documentary’s authors, Verena Paravel and Lucien Castin-Taylor, said they had a range of “very conflicting feelings” in the months they spent near Cannibals Issei Sagawa and his brother, Jun, are fans of self-mutilation.

“We were disgusted and dumbfounded, we wanted to understand…”, explained Verena Paravel, adding that it was, however, “a movie about sisterhood, about love”.