People are weirder than we think and that weirdness has found a fuller and more public expression through the Internet, especially concerning love and death.

Some recent stories of human folly serve as a warning notice for parents, who are now bound to keep their eyes on their children even within the safe confines of their homes.

There are of course the stories of underage girls and boys getting enticed by adults in chat rooms. One of the most famous cases of this type involved a British 12-year-old schoolgirl, Shevaun Pennington, who spent five days on the run with a former US Marine she met over the Internet before being captured in 2003.

No, such stories are a tragedy, but in this age are not weird enough. What is weird is the number of suicide pacts being made by strangers.

One of the weirdest involved a cannibal, Armin Meiwes, who confessed to killing, dismembering and eating another man who allegedly agreed to the arrangement over the Internet.

Meiwes was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to 8? years in prison last year in Germany. The defence had argued during the trial that since the victim volunteered to be killed and eaten, it should be classified as a mercy killing.

His victim had travelled from Berlin to Meiwes' hometown in reply to an Internet posting that said he was seeking a young man for “slaughter and consumption”.

Meiwes testified that Brandes wanted to be stabbed to death after drinking a bottle of cold medicine to lose consciousness. The whole act was recorded in a video Meiwes made of the killing. Ironically, Meiwes was caught after a student in Austria alerted German police to a message Meiwes had posted on the Internet looking for another victim.

“If I hadn't been so stupid as to keep looking on the Internet, I would have taken my secret to the grave,” Meiwes said in his closing statement.

Earlier this year we woke up on Valentine's Day the read about Gerald Krein, 26, who was charged with solicitation to commit murder and conspiracy to commit manslaughter, after unsuccessfully attempting to get a group of women to hang themselves at his home in Oregon.

Krein made contact with the women via an Internet chat room. The Internet suicide pact was planned for Valentine's Day. Among those who agreed to kill themselves was a mother who also planned to kill her two young children.

The alleged plot was prevented only when a Canadian woman regained her senses and alerted authorities. Three other women subsequently came forward and revealed more information about the group called “Suicide Party 2005”.

Perhaps stranger than that, if only for the energy of imagination, is the case of the 14-year-old British boy, known in court as “B”, who used the Internet to persuade a 15-year-old stranger, known as “A”, to kill him in an Internet chatroom.

Police found 56,000 lines of text, a book, detailing an entirely fabulous and fictional plot, on boy B's computer. The complex series of stories involved around eight main characters, including Boy B as himself and his Internet “friend”, known as Boy A.

The other characters were all fictional. Boy B began his grooming of Boy A in early 2003 by posing as a teenage girl. Boy A fell in love with the fictional 16-year-old girl, who then introduced Boy A to Boy B, as himself.

Boy A was told the girl was Boy B's stepsister. The fictional girl then introduced Boy A to another fictional character, who she said was her natural brother and Boy B's step brother. Then another fictional character was introduced. Boy A was than told that the new character, described as a stalker, had killed his cyber girlfriend.

The girl's brother then committed suicide, leaving Boy A, Boy B and the fictional stalker.

Boy A was then contacted by another fictional character, a woman who claimed she was a member of the British secret service and was on a mission to protect Boy B.

The spy was then killed off after sending Boy A an e-mail saying: “By the time you read this I will be dead.” Boy B then introduced another fictional spy, also a woman, into the mix.

The fictional spy convinced Boy A that he would be recruited as a spy and could have sex with her, if he followed her orders. She told Boy A that Boy B had a tumour and was costing the government too much money. She ordered Boy A to kill Boy B.

On 28 June 2003 the two boys had their first face-to-face meeting. Boy A carried out the attack, stabbing Boy B twice with a knife. Fortunately Boy B did not die. In court Boy A admitted attempted murder and Boy B has admitted incitement to murder (his own).

In an analysis of this disturbing trend of suicide, in particular suicide pacts on the Internet, Sundararajan Rajagopal points out that the practice seems particularly prevalent in Japan. Nine people in Japan formed two cybersuicide pacts and did the deed together in October 2004.

“What is unusual is that these pacts seem to have been arranged between strangers who met over the Internet and planned the tragedy via special suicide websites,” he wrote in the British Medical Journal. “This is in contrast to traditional suicide pacts, in which the victims are people with close relationships.”

He points out that an increasing number of websites graphically describe suicide methods, including details of doses of medication that would be fatal in overdose. Such websites can perhaps trigger suicidal behaviour in predisposed individuals, particularly adolescents, he warns.

He theorises that if the Internet has changed the epidemiology of suicide pacts (which currently account for one percent of all suicide cases), then it can only increase. Young people living on their own who may have otherwise committed suicide alone may now have more opportunity to join with like-minded suicidal persons to die together.

“General practitioners and psychiatrists should continue to remain vigilant against the small but not insignificant risk of suicide pacts, especially while encountering middle aged depressed men who have dependent submissive partners,” he notes. “While assessing risk, one may specifically ask whether a depressed patient uses the Internet to obtain information about suicide.”

Contact Ahmed at ahmed.elamin@wanadoo.fr. Go to www.SecureBermuda.com for security updates.