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 says police then searched the man’s property and he showed them several places where he had buried body parts.