A gay policeman in Germany has been arrested on suspicion of killing and chopping up a man he met on a cannibal website who apparently fantasised about being killed and eaten.

“The victim had been fantasising about being killed and eaten by someone else since his youth,” Dresden police chief Dieter Kroll told a news conference on Friday.

Police say that the victim was tortured, killed and dismembered, and that his body parts were buried on a piece of land which belonged to the alleged killer.

Dresden police said the suspect was a 55-year-old who worked as a technical expert in the criminal investigation department. The victim was identified only as a 59-year-old man from Hanover and the case was being treated as murder, they said.

Police say that body parts of the victim were missing, and they presume that cannibalism took place.