The judge sentencing Peter Bryan at London's Old Bailey court said his conviction would leave no possibility of early release.

The 35-year-old, characterized by expert witnesses as a paranoid schizophrenic, has already served seven years in a high-security psychiatric hospital for beating to death a 20-year-old store assistant with a hammer in 1993. He was released in 2001.

In February 2004, while living in a community mental health facility in east London, Bryan went to visit a friend, Brian Cherry, 43, at home in nearby Walthamstow.

Neighbors heard screams from the home and alerted police, who discovered Bryan had killed his friend and was cooking the dismembered body and brains in a frying pan.

Prosecutor Aftab Jafferjee said Bryan had inflicted more than 24 blows to Cherry's head, chopped him up with the aid of kitchen knives and had already eaten some of the man's brain cooked in butter by the time police arrived.

Bryan, who appeared in court in a black suit surrounded by four mental health workers and a court officer, admitted manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility.

Prosecutors dropped calls for a murder conviction on the weight of psychiatric evidence.

Reading out the sentence, Judge Giles Forrester told Bryan he had gotten a "thrill and a feeling of power when you ate flesh".

"The violence on each occasion was extreme and unpredictable, accompanied by bizarre and sexual overtones... The seriousness of the offenses is exceptionally high, even having regard to your illness," he said.

Bryan also admitted to manslaughter also in relation to Richard Loudwell, a 59-year-old also interned at the Broadmoor psychiatric hospital where Bryan was sent after Cherry's killing.

A week after he arrived, in April 2004, he smashed Loudwell's head on the dining room floor, and tried to strangle him with a cord. The man died from the injuries suffered during the attack two months later.

According to the prosecutor Bryan later explained that he had been thinking of attacking Loudwell for a few days. "He had wanted to eat him, but he did not have time," Jafferjee said.

"He said Richard Loudwell was the oldest and weakest in the ward and that he was the lowest on the food chain," the lawyer said.

He also said that Bryan had attacked prison staff, saying he wanted to eat someone's nose.

In interviews with psychiatrists read out in court, Bryan said eating body parts was part of a voodoo ritual he carried out to transform the power of his victims to himself -- a feeling he dubbed the "quickening".

He believed human flesh was part of the "natural food chain" and described wanting to drink human blood as it was "full of protein", Jafferjee said.

Psychiatrists told the judge Bryan suffered from paranoid schizophrenia and a personality disorder, and was capable of appearing calm while still capable of violence.

Defense counsel David Etherington charged the state with insufficient care of Bryan, saying: "This defendant is the victim of a terrible illness and regrettably, we must submit, he is also the victim of a state unable to control it."