Artist sparks police murder hunt

An Austrian concept artist sparked an Interpol murder hunt when chilling photographs she’d taken of of herself posing as a corpse were sent to the police by film printers.

Sigrid Fleckseder and partner Christian Thomas had taken the realistic snaps showing her apparently dead on a river bank with ripped clothing as part of a project titled ‘The Four Seasons of Death.’

But when they handed the memory stick to a local electronics store in Vienna, Austria, the horrified staff sent them to their head office in Germany who immediately called in Interpol detectives.

One grim image shows the apparently lifeless woman’s ‘body’ face down in the grass with her skirt lifted at the back and her top torn up to reveal her bra.

“They were very convincing. They fooled several police forces,” said one police source.

Sigrid only realised there was an international inquiry into her ‘murder’ when police turned up at her home, given as the return address for the photographs.

“I don’t know who was more surprised – me at them being there, or them at finding me still alive,” she said.

A police spokesman confimred: “The photographic company were convinced that these photographs were evidence of an undiscovered violent crime and handed them over to Interpol.”

Sigrid added: “All kinds of things went through my head when they said they were from the murder squad.

“I never thought there might be there about photos, because we’d shot them more than a month ago and they hadn’t really been exhibited.

“I am sorry that we caused such a fuss but I think it’s very positive that the photo company reacted as they did and that the police followed it up so quickly.”