French 'Hannibal Lecter' Gets 30 Years in Prison for Dining on Cell Mate

PARIS, June 25, 2010— -- A French prison inmate called the "cannibal of Rouen" by the media and "completely crazy" by his own lawyer has been convicted of killing his cell mate and then dining on the man's lung.

Nicolas Cocaign, 38, was sentenced to 30 years in prison following Thursday's conviction on charges of murder, acts of torture and barbarism.

Before his sentence was handed down, fresh details of the grisly crime emerged.

A medical examiner testified that the victim was still alive when Cocaign cut open his chest. And Cocaign told the court that before cooking the man's left lung with shallots, garlic and some left over rice, he sampled the man's organ.

"At first, I ate a bit of it raw," Cocaign testified. "I did it out of curiosity, instinctively, without thinking, to taste human flesh."

The grisly four-day trial of Cocaign, a violent prison inmate with tattoos on his face, could have been scripted from the pages of a "Hannibal Lecter" novel.

On the morning of Jan. 3, 2007, a guard in the Rouen prison found the mutilated body of Thierry Baudry, 31, in the 118-square feet cell he shared with Cocaign and another inmate. Cocaign confessed to beating Baudry, stabbing him with scissors and suffocating him with a plastic bag before cutting open his victim's chest with a razor blade and plunging his right hand in it.

"We got into an argument last night. I 'smoked' him" while tying his shoes," Cocaign calmly told the guard Frederic R. who testified in court this week. "Smoked him" is French prison slang for a killing.

He told investigators he wanted to remove Baudry's heart to eat it in order to "take his soul." Instead, Cocaign mistakenly took a piece of his victim's left lung as well as two chest muscles. A row over hygiene issues was what triggered Cocaign's outburst of violence.

A third inmate in the cell pretended to be asleep to avoid being killed, but later committed suicide in another prison.

Cocaign's lawyer asked the court to pronounce his client's "criminal irresponsibility" and find him "not guilty" because of his mental state.

"He killed because he is crazy, completely crazy," defense lawyer Fabien Picchiottino pleaded. "One does not put on trial insane people. The place of these people suffering from troubles is in a psychiatric hospital," he said. The lawyer blamed Cocaign's murderous impulse on the "failure of the psychiatric, penitentiary and social system".