A man was caught eating a half-burnt corpse at a crematorium in the south Indian state of Tamil Nadu on Sunday.

Murugesan, 43, was accused of committing similar crimes in the past and was allegedly indulging in cannibalism for over a month. Villagers suspected dogs chewed off the bodies and decided to go to the crematorium to see what was happening. On Sunday, a villager cremated a relative’s body and pretended to return home.  He along with few other villagers, however, hid in the crematorium. Around 1.30 a.m. Murugesan reached the place and cut out the flesh from the corpse using a sickle. He then started eating it, local news outlet Times Now reported.

The villagers shouted and pelting stones at him. Murugesan, however, did not pay heed to them and continued eating the body. The villagers immediately informed police, who reached the crematorium and caught him red-handed. Murugesan was in an inebriated condition at the time.

“When we interrogated the locals, they said it was Murugesan, a daily wage laborer from T Ramanathapuram village. Since he was addicted to drugs, his wife and children had left him. That is why, Murugesan started to roam here and there,” Antony, an inspector with Vasudevanallur police, said, local daily the Hindustan Times reported.

Villagers said they often found human flesh strewn across the crematorium, however, thought dogs were chewing on the corpses.

“Initially, we thought that it was the act of stray canines. However, after Murugesan’s arrest we came to the conclusion that he had attempted to eat flesh,” a villager, S. Mayandi, said.

During police interrogation, Murugesan did not utter a word. Police felt he was unstable and immediately sent him to a mental hospital for treatment.

“As the locals alleged this, we reached the spot and questioned Murugesan. Since he is mentally unstable, we sent him to Institute of Mental health in Kilpauk,” Antony said.

In a similar incident related to cannibalism, three people were sentenced to 71 years in prison for murdering people, eating their bodies, baking their flesh into pastries and selling it to neighbors in Garanhuns, northeastern Brazil.

Jorge Beltrao Negromonte da Silveira, his wife Isabel Pires, and his mistress Bruna Cristina Oliveira offered young women work as nanny in their house and then murdered them and ate their bodies. Pires then made meat pastries with the flesh and sold it in the neighborhood. The remaining body parts of the corpses were then buried in the backyard.