French Hannibal Lecter tells how he ate cellmate's lung

A prisoner told a French court yesterday that a sexual urge drove him to kill his cellmate - and that "curiosity" about the taste of human flesh led him to cook and eat the lung he ripped out of the corpse.

Nicolas Cocaign, dubbed the "French Hannibal Lecter" by international media covering his murder trial in the northern city of Rouen, gave the court a blow by blow account of how and why he killed Thierry Baudry.

He said he flew into an "uncontrollable" rage after his victim gave him a "dirty look" on January 2, 2007 after he ordered him to wash his hands after going to the toilet in the cell they shared with a third inmate in Rouen.

"I had a sexual urge, an adrenaline rush," Mr Cocaign, whose face is tattooed with bloody tears and a skull, told the court on the third day of a trial whose verdict is due today.

He said that after pummelling his victim, he took a pair of scissors and plunged it into his back, neck and chest a dozen times before holding a plastic bag over his head "for five minutes" to make sure he was dead.

Then, in an act that has sparked the comparisons with the fictional cannibalistic serial killer Hannibal Lecter, he decided to eat Mr Baudry's heart for his evening meal.

"I take a razor blade and I open his chest. I plunge my hand in and I take out what I think is the heart but which in fact is a piece of lung, which I put into a Tupperware container," he told a transfixed courtroom.