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

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

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