German nurse under investigation for killing patients
August 30, 2019
A nurse in south-western Germany is being investigated on five counts of murder and two accounts of attempted murder.
The public prosecutor's office in Saarbrücken made the announcement on Friday, stating that the man allegedly administered non-prescribed medicine to patients.
The suspect, identified only as B., is currently serving a seperate prison sentence for fraud.
Prosecutors allege that B. "had acted with the intention of putting patients in a life-threatening condition where reanimation measures were required, in order to resuscitate them himself."
Read more: Police pin more murders on noxious German nurse Niels H.
Four-year-long investigation
The suspected crimes are thought to have occurred between March 2015 through March 2016. Investigations, however, did not officially begin until June 2016.
Suspicion only began to rise when the man appeared at an intensive care unit at a hospital in Saarburg, claiming to be an emergency doctor from the nearby Homborg University Hospital. He claimed he needed to carry out a special examination on a patient. He wore an emergency doctor's jacket and had a defibrillator with him. The man did not manage to reach the patient and was subquently arrested by police.
A background check and inquiries made in Homborg confirmed that the man was in fact not a doctor there, but rather a nurse. The man had not shown up for his shift that night.
It also turned out that the suspect had already been the subject of an internal investigation by the clinic, leading to further suspicions that he had administered unauthorized drugs to patients.
Read more: German nurse accused of dozens of murders apologizes
Examinations show deadly substances
Authorities exhumed seven bodies and conducted a toxicology examination as part of their investigation. The results indicated that non-prescribed substances were found in six former patients from a clinic in Völklingen, They died between March 2015 and March 2016. The potentially deadly substances found included ajmaline.
The suspect was employed at the clinic in Völklingen from January 2015 to March 2016, and then briefly at Homburg University Hospital from early May to mid-June 2016.
Read more: German nurse confesses to killing 100 patients
Niels Hogel copycat?
The case is reminiscent of Niels Högel, Germany's most notorious post-war serial killer. Hogel allegedly killed as many as 100 patients while working as a hospital nurse in Lower Saxony. After initially confessing to killing 30 patients, further investigations revealed that he had in fact murdered about three times that number. Högel, like the suspect, had also used the lethal substance, ajmaline.
The former nurse was sentenced to life in prison in June 2019 after being found guilty of 85 accounts of murder. He had admitted to killing patients with lethal injection, selected at random.
The exact number of people Högel murdered remains uncertain, partly because many former patients were buried under fire, rendering autopsies impossible.
mvb/rt (dpa, AFP)