German`s Diary Records Slow Starvation Suicide

According to the diary, the man had suffered a broken marriage, was estranged from daughter and had had his unemployment benefit stopped.

An unemployed German man, tired of life, chronicled his suicide by starvation in a diary after withdrawing to a hunter's hide in the countryside near Hanover, police said on Tuesday.

The 58-year-old's decaying corpse was found on Friday by two hunters in the hide, five metres (16 feet) above the ground, almost a month after the last entry on Dec. 13, a police spokesman said.

According to the diary, the man had suffered a broken marriage, was estranged from his daughter and had had his unemployment benefit stopped, the spokesman said. "It's clearly a suicide," he added.

The diary, which detailed 24 days the man spent without eating, will be passed on to his daughter.