Modern era

• During the 1930s, multiple acts of cannibalism were reported from the Ukraine during the Holodomor.
• A well-documented case occurred in Chichijima in February 1945, when Japanese soldiers killed and consumed five American airmen. This case was investigated in 1947 in a war crimes trial, and of 30 Japanese soldiers prosecuted, five (Maj. Matoba, Gen. Tachibana, Adm. Mori, Capt. Yoshii and Dr. Teraki) were found guilty and hanged.
• During the 900-day Siege of Leningrad during World War II, reports of cannibalism began to appear in the winter of 1941-1942, after all birds, rats and pets were eaten by survivors. People were murdered for their flesh and Leningrad police had to form a special division to combat cannibalism.
• During his service in World War II, John F. Kennedy believed that a boy from the Solomon Islands, bragged of eating a Japanese soldier. Native islanders in their historical culture also practiced headhunting.
• Prior to 1931, New York Times reporter William Buehler Seabrook, in the interests of research, obtained from a hospital intern at the Sorbonne a chunk of human meat from the body of a healthy human killed by accident, and cooked and ate it. He reported that, "It was like good, fully developed veal, not young, but not yet beef. It was very definitely like that, and it was not like any other meat I had ever tasted. It was so nearly like good, fully developed veal that I think no person with a palate of ordinary, normal sensitiveness could distinguish it from veal. It was mild, good meat with no other sharply defined or highly characteristic taste such as for instance, goat, high game, and pork have. The steak was slightly tougher than prime veal, a little stringy, but not too tough or stringy to be agreeably edible. The roast, from which I cut and ate a central slice, was tender, and in color, texture, smell as well as taste, strengthened my certainty that of all the meats we habitually know, veal is the one meat to which this meat is accurately comparable."
• While stating that nearly all areas of Appalachia have never practised cannibalism, James K. Crissman references incidents of mortuary cannibalism from as recently as the late 1930s in some parts of mountainous eastern Kentucky. The practice was intended to honor and dignify the deceased, and the consumption of the corpse was meant to comfort the survivors. Crissman speculates that this rare ritual went out of practice with the encroachment of technology and American society into this geographically isolated region. One such incident is hinted at by a local newspaper of Knox County, Kentucky in 1904. The article, Killed by Train, describes the death of Jno. Cox by freight train. A blurb at the end of the article states the date and time of the visitation and hints at the consumption of "the mortal remains of those who have crossed over the dark river of death" -- a concealed metaphor that practitioners of this ritual would know. In Noodling for Flatheads: Moonshine, Monster Catfish and Other Southern Comforts, when speaking of the large number of Creutzfeldt-Jakob outbreaks in Kentucky supposedly due to eating squirrel brains, the author, Burkhard Bilger, suggests that they may instead be due to possible continuing practices of mortuary cannibalism in the area; however, it should be noted that rumors of mortuary cannibalism in twenty-first century Appalachia are still considered speculation.
• References to cannibalizing the enemy has also been seen in poetry written when China was repressed in the Song Dynasty, though the cannibalizing sounds more like poetic symbolism to express the hatred towards the enemy. (See Man Jiang Hong) The Chinese hate-cannibalism was reported during World War II also. (Key Ray Chong:Cannibalism in China, 1990)
• In his book Flyboys: A True Story of Courage, James Bradley details several instances of cannibalism of World War II Allied prisoners by their Japanese captors. The author claims that this included not only ritual cannibalization of the livers of freshly-killed prisoners, but also the cannibalization-for-sustenance of living prisoners over the course of several days, amputating limbs only as needed to keep the meat fresh.^{[citation needed]}
• The Soviet writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn, in his novel The Gulag Archipelago, describes cases of cannibalism in the twentieth-century USSR. Of the famine in Povolzhie (1921-1922) he writes: "That horrible famine was up to cannibalism, up to consuming children by their own parents - the famine, which Russia had never known even in Time of Troubles [in 1601-1603]..." . He says of the Siege of Leningrad (1941-1944): "Those who consumed human flesh, or dealt with the human liver trading from dissecting rooms… were accounted as the political criminals…". And of the building of Northern Railway Prisoners Camp ("SevZhelDorLag") Solzhenitsyn writes: "An ordinary hard working political prisoner almost could not survive at that penal camp. In the camp SevZhelDorLag (chief: colonel Klyuchkin) in 1946-47 there were many cases of cannibalism: they cut human bodies, cooked and ate."
• The Soviet journalist Yevgenia Ginzburg, former long-term political prisoner, who spent time in the Soviet prisons, Gulag camps and settlements from 1938 to 1955, describes in her memoir book "Harsh Route" (or "Steep Route") the case, which she was directly involved in late 1940s, after she had been moved to the prisoners hospital. "...The chief warder shows me the black smoked pot, filled with some food: 'I need your medical expertize regarding this meat.' I look into the pot, and hardly hold vomiting. The fibers of that meat are very small, and don't resemble me anything I have seen before. The skin on some pieces bristles with the black hair... A former smith from Poltava, Kulesh worked together with Centurashvili. At this time, Centurashvili was only one month before discharge from the camp... And recently he surprisingly disappeared. The warders looked around the hills, wrote the Kulesh's evidence, that last time Kulesh had seen his workmate near the fireplace, Kulesh went out to work and Centurashvili left to warm himself more; but when Kulesh was back to the fireplace, Centurashvili had vanished; who knows, may be got frozen somewhere in snow, he was a weak guy... The warders searched two more days, and then assumed that was an escape case, though they wondered, as his imprisonment period was almost over... The crime was there. Approaching to the fireplace, Kulesh killed Centurashvili with an axe, burned his clothes, then dismembered him, and hid the pieces in snow, in different places, putting the specific marks on each burial place... Just yesterday, one body part was found under two crossed log..."
• Cannibalism was reported by the journalist Neil Davis during the South East Asian wars of the 1960s and 1970s. Davis reported that Cambodian troops ritually ate portions of the slain enemy, typically the liver. However he, and many refugees, also report that cannibalism was practised non-ritually when there was no food to be found. This usually occurred when towns and villages were under Khmer Rouge control, and food was strictly rationed, leading to widespread starvation. Any civilian caught participating in cannibalism would have been immediately executed.
• Cannibalism has been reported in several recent African conflicts, including the Second Congo War, and the civil wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone. A U.N. human rights expert reported in July 2007 that sexual atrocities against Congolese women go 'far beyond rape' and include sexual slavery, forced incest, and cannibalism.Typically, this is apparently done in desperation, as during peacetime cannibalism is much less frequent. Even so, it is sometimes directed at certain groups believed to be relatively helpless, such as Congo Pygmies. It is also reported by some that witch doctors sometimes use the body parts of children in their medicine.^{[citation needed]} In the 1970s the Ugandan dictator Idi Amin was reputed to practise cannibalism.
• On October 13, 1972, a Uruguayan rugby team flew across the Andes to play a game in Chile. The plane crashed near the border between Chile and Argentina. After several weeks of starvation and struggle for survival, the numerous survivors decided to eat the frozen bodies of the deceased in order to survive. They were rescued over two months later. See Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571. The 1993 film Alive tells the story of this ordeal.
• It has been reported by defectors and refugees that, at the height of the famine in 1996, cannibalism was sometimes practised in North Korea.
• Médecins Sans Frontières, the international medical charity, supplied photographic and other documentary evidence of ritualised cannibal feasts among the participants in Liberia's internecine strife in the 1980s to representatives of Amnesty International who were on a fact-finding mission to the neighbouring state of Guinea. However, Amnesty International declined to publicise this material; the Secretary-General of the organization, Pierre Sane, said at the time in an internal communication that "what they do with the bodies after human rights violations are committed is not part of our mandate or concern". The existence of cannibalism on a wide scale in Liberia was subsequently verified in video documentaries by Journeyman Pictures of London.^{[citation needed]}
• In March 2001 in Germany, Armin Meiwes posted an Internet ad asking for "a well built 18 to 30 year old to be slaughtered and consumed". The ad was answered by Jürgen Armando Brandes. After killing and eating Brandes, Meiwes was convicted of manslaughter and later, murder. The song "Mein Teil" by Rammstein is based on this.
• In September 2006, Australian television crews from 60 Minutes and Today Tonight attempted to rescue a six-year-old boy who they believed would be ritually cannibalised by his tribe, the Korowai, from Papua, Indonesia.
• On January 13, 2007, Danish artist Marco Evaristti hosted a dinner party for his most intimate friends. The main meal was agnolotti pasta, on which was topped a meatball made with the artist's own fat, removed earlier in the year in a liposuction operation .
• On September 4th, 2007 Serbian police stated that they have identified 26-year-old Danijel Jakupek Zak from Serbian village Novi Banovci. He killed a 5 year old boy and his uncle (26), who was Jakupek's schoolmate and also the son of Jakupek's school teacher. Police reported that Jakupek rehearsed several cannibalistic acts on approximately 20 cats which were buried in his backyard and that 10 live cats were also found in his apartment, probably awaiting future experiments. He stated that he had to try the practice on a human being. As stated, he obviously enjoyed the massacre of his alleged victims, drank their blood and even tried their meat. In his apartment police found a stack of cannibalistic and satanic literature. He also claimed that in the prosecution of his two victims "He entered his body". Jakupek was questioned regarding the aforementioned unnamed person who only goes by the name "He" and he replied that "He" is a "superior mighty lord" but not pointing out any specific icon. Neighbors described him as being very strange, having a "sparkly look" and he obviously indicated that he is mentally distorted.
• On September 14, a man named Özgür Dengiz was captured in Ankara, the Turkish capital, after killing and eating a man. Dengiz in his initial testimony said he "enjoyed" eating human flesh. He frequently burst into long laughing sessions during the testimony, police officers said. His past record also spoke of what was to come. In 1997, he was jailed for murder of a friend, when he was 17, but he got out of jail on parole after serving only three years . Dengiz said he did not know Cafer Er, his 55 year old victim who worked as a garbage collector. Dengiz shot Er in the head with a firearm, because he felt Er was making the area "too crowded." After cutting slices of flesh from his victim's body, Dengiz distributed the rest to stray dogs on the street, according to his own testimony. He ate some of Er's flesh raw on his way home. Dengiz,who lived with his parents arrived at the family house and placed the remaining parts of Er's body in the fridge without saying a word to his parents. Also in his testimony he said, "I have no regrets, my conscience is free. I constantly thought of killing. I had dreams where I was being sacrificed. I decided to kill, to sacrifice others in place of me."