A German policeman has been arrested on suspicion of killing and chopping up a man he met on a fetish website for cannibalism and who allegedly fantasised about being killed and eaten.

Officials said on Friday that the officer is believed to have fatally stabbed the victim at his home in the eastern state of Saxony on 4 November, chopping up the body and burying pieces in his garden. They said the killing happened about a month after the two first met in an internet chatroom.

"The victim had been fantasising about being killed and eaten by someone else since his youth," Dresden's police chief, Dieter Kroll, told a news conference. It was not immediately clear whether any act of cannibalism had taken place.

Kroll said the officer was arrested on Wednesday at his workplace in the city. He said police searched the man's property and he showed them several places where he had buried body parts.

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.

The investigation recalled the case of Armin Meiwes, dubbed the "Cannibal of Rothenburg", who killed and ate a man who had advertised on the internet for someone to kill him "and leave no trace". Meiwes, who filmed the act, was sentenced to life imprisonment in 2006.