A murderer who was given a life sentence after being found responsible for chopping off a teacher’s head and packing her body parts in a bag and becoming obsessed with Hannibal Lecter filed an appeal against the ruling.

Kajetan Poznanski was imprisoned in 2021 for a crime that sent shockwaves through Poland. He claimed to have killed the woman as part of a “self-improvement plan” to the judges. His attorneys are now arguing that his conviction should be overturned.

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Who is Kajetan Poznanski?

Kajetan Poznanski, who was born in 1997 in Poland, gained popularity as “Hannibal of Zoliborz” due to his obsession with the fictitious serial killer.

Poznanski pretended to be interested in learning Italian when he went to Katarzyna Jaroszyska’s house in 2016.

Once inside, he pulled out a knife and attacked the unaware 30-year-old in what the prosecution described as a premeditated killing.

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He then dissected the woman’s body with a saw and placed the remains in a bag before hailing a taxi back to his leased flat. When the taxi driver asked why there was blood streaming from the luggage, he allegedly replied that he was transporting the carcass of a wild boar. Instead of eating the woman’s remains, Poznanski set fire to his residence to cover the evidence when he returned home.

Firefighters called to put out the fire discovered the teacher’s remains. A sack contained her head. Katarzyna had intended to fly to Bologna, Italy, later that day to see her boyfriend, according to local media. The seasoned Italian language instructor, who is originally from Radom, Poland, studied art history before relocating to Warsaw to enroll in the University of Warsaw’s applied linguistics program.

Later, the murderer explained his motivation for carrying out the massacre, saying that he “had to kill someone to get rid of the belief that a human life was worth more than a pig or a fly.”

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Poznanski, a talented student whose grandpa had been a well-known journalist and whose parents were an architect and a prosecutor, was working as an intern at one of the most prominent current affairs publications in Poland. He pitched several pieces about cannibalism while he was there.

One was titled ‘Famous Gourmets – Between Rome and Hannibal Lecter,’ and he advised exposing his taste to “true culinary classics.”

Another was labeled ‘About Hannibal Lecter (21st century),’ and it queried, “What is the moral difference between eating a chicken and eating a human?” None.’ ‘Lede: Hey carnivores!’ he wrote in another, under the headline ‘How to Be a Good Carnivore?’ Shouldn’t we kill our dinner at least once in our lives in order to be ethically compatible?