A US tattoo artist who chopped up another tattooist with an axe could be locked up for life as a German court heard on Monday that he killed with "particular savagery."

The 30-year-old New Yorker identified only as James B., had only been living in Berlin for about six months when he got into a drunken argument with an Austrian tattooist.

“He first hit the man straight in the face with an axe, damaging his skull and cutting through his nose and mouth,” Tobias Kaehne, spokesman for the Berlin District Court, told The Local.

“Because he killed him with particular savagery, the usual sentencing limit of 15 years for murder could be extended to life.”

Forensic detectives found at least 52 injuries on the Austrian Raoul Schmidhuber’s body, after it had been recovered in pieces from the Spree River and the Schäfer Lake in and around the German capital.

The cause of death was drowning - in his own blood.

http://www.thelocal.de/national/20120416-41973.html