Berlin - German police broke into a darkened flat fearing they would find a dead body after neighbours complained of a nasty smell seeping out on to the staircase.

The shutters of the apartment had been closed for more than a week and the postbox was filled with uncollected mail.

But instead of a corpse police found a tenant with really smelly feet asleep in bed next to a pile of foul-smelling laundry, said police in the southwestern town of Kaiserslautern on Sunday.