Why do some people eat others?

It did not start with the Kenyan student in America, Alexander Kinyua, who is suspected of killing his housemate and eating his heart and part of his brain.

CNN reported that the electrical engineering student’s father told the Maryland police that he came across two metal tins containing the head and two hands of Kujoe Bonsafo Agyei-Kodie, Kinyua’s Ghanaian housemate, covered with a blanket in the family basement laundry room.

The rest of the remains were found in a rubbish bin.

Kinyua’s case is not an isolated one

Last month, the Associated Press (AP) reported that the Miami-Dade police department shot and killed a 31-year-old man identified as Rudy Eugene after he refused to stop eating another man’s face in Miami on 26 May.

The police are still looking for Luka Rocco Magnotta, 29, a suspect in the gruesome case of severed body parts found in packages mailed to Ottawa, Ontario.

In a list of six cannibalism cases that took place in the past few months, the website Huffington Post reported that Mao Sugiyama, a self-described “asexual” from Tokyo, removed his genitals in a surgical operation, cooked them, and served them hot to five people while a former employee of a Swedish medical university is accused of cutting off his wife’s lips and eating them after he allegedly flew into a rage.

Cannibalism is perhaps the ultimate cultural taboo and crime in the same rank as raping the dead, but it has been with us since time immemorial.

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Experts say reasons for cannibalism range from cultural purposes to survival when there is no food and the only alternative is starvation. However, some sick minds eat human flesh for pleasure.

One of the first recorded accounts of cannibalism was reported after Christopher Columbus’ discovery voyages to the West Indies. Europeans visiting the Caribbean later heard tales of the inhabitants of the islands eating the flesh of slain enemies in a post-war ritual.

On 9 February, 1874, American gold prospector Alfred Packer and five colleagues left on an expedition to the Colorado Mountains but he returned alone two months later.

Questioned about the whereabouts of the rest of his team, he said he killed them in self defence and ate them in order to survive. He was sentenced to 40 years in prison but was granted parole because sufficient doubt remained about the crime.

On 16 January, 1936 a US court sentenced Albert Fish to be executed for kidnapping, killing, and consuming a 10-year-old Manhattan girl. Fish was described as a true life monster that was sadistic and delusional.

On 11 June, 1981, Issei Sagawa a Japanese student studying in Paris, shot a classmate and ate her over two days. When he was arrested, Sagawa was deemed unfit for trial due to insanity and was deported to Japan, where a paperwork error ensures
that he is now a free man.

On 14 February, 1994, Ukraine-born serial killer Andrei Chikatilo was executed after admitting to befriending, killing, and eating more than 50 people.

On 28 November, 1994 prisoners at the Colombia Correctional Institution in Milwaukee took the law into their hands and punished inmate Jeffrey Dahmer by beating him to death for his crimes.

The crimes ranged from luring young men to his apartment, where he would kill and dismember them after sedating them with alcohol or drugs. He would then eat or experiment with their remains.

The world watched in amazement when horror images on a baby monitor about a Czech family of cultists and cannibals on 10 May, 2007. Six members of the family were convicted for eating their younger children.