German Nurse Found to Have Murdered At least 90 Patients During His Practice!
Police say they have found evidence
that Niels Högel, who was jailed for killing two patients, murdered more with
lethal drug.
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| Niels Hoegel appearing on court. Photo credit Bild |
Niels Högel, 40, was jailed for life
in February 2015 for two murders and several attempted murders of intensive
care patients at Delmenhorst hospital in northern Germany.
But police have found evidence of
another 88 murders after analysing scores of patient files and exhuming more
than 130 bodies in Germany, Poland and Turkey, starting during his employment
at another hospital and continuing after he was caught in the act by a
colleague.
Since several of Högel’s patients
were cremated, police said the real figure could be higher.
“The death toll is unique in the
history of the German republic,” said the chief police investigator, Arne
Schmidt, adding that Högel had killed randomly and preyed on those in a
critical condition.
There was “evidence for at least 90
murders, and at least as many [suspected] cases again that can no longer be
proven”, he told a press conference, declaring himself “speechless” at the
outcome.
Police believe that the man whom the
Bild newspaper is calling “Germany’s worst serial killer” carried out his first
murder in February 2000, when he was still employed at a clinic in Oldenburg in
Lower Saxony, close to the Dutch border.
After killing at least another 35
patients, he moved in 2002 to a hospital in Delmenhorst near the north-western
city of Bremen, where he resumed his grisly practice within a week of starting
his new job.
Högel would inject patients’ veins
with a cardiovascular drug in order to orchestrate medical emergencies that
would require him to step in and resuscitate them in the hospital’s intensive
care unit.
The nurse used five different drugs
including ajmaline, sotalol, lidocaine, amiodarone and calcium chloride, police
said on Monday. Overdoses can lead to life-threatening cardiac arrhythmia and a
drop in blood pressure, causing a rapid decline in an already ill patient.
During Högel’s time in Delmenhorst,
the number of deaths at the hospital’s intensive unit doubled from about 5% to
10%, though the issue was not raised with authorities.
On 22 June 2005, a colleague at
Delmenhorst hospital witnessed Högel injecting ajmaline into a patient, who
died a day later. However, management decided not to call the police or raise
the issue with their employee directly until two days later, allowing the nurse
to kill another patient, his last, at 7pm on 24 June.
Six employees of the Delmenhorst
clinic have been charged with manslaughter through failure to render
assistance, while an investigation into neglect at the Oldenburg hospital is
continuing.
“The murders could have been
prevented,” said Oldenburg’s head of police, Johann Kühme. He added that those
in charge could have acted faster to stop further loss of life. Instead, the
nurse was given a spotless report that allowed him to continue his killing
spree at another institution. “People at the clinic in Oldenburg knew of the
abnormalities.”
When Högel was sentenced in 2008 to
seven and a half years in prison for attempted murder, a woman who had followed
the case in the media contacted police with suspicions that her mother could
have also fallen victim to him.
The case was brought back to court,
and in January 2015 Högel confessed to administering 90 unauthorised injections,
of which 30 had been fatal because he had been unable to resuscitate the
patients. At the time, he said he felt “fully responsible” for the 30 deaths
but denied any further killings.
Konstantin Karyofilis, a
psychiatrist, said last year that Högel was aware he had caused many people,
including his patients and their families, “huge damage, suffering and
anxiety”. He said the former nurse wanted it to be known that he was not
“basking in the limelight” of his case. “This is not so. He is deeply ashamed,”
he told the court.
As the extent of the nurse’s crimes
has emerged, there have been calls for tighter controls on the use of drugs at
clinics. The Högel case is the most extreme and bleakest of a number of similar
instances that have shaken Germany’s healthcare system in recent decades.
In 2006, a male nurse was sentenced to life for the murder
of 29 patients at a hospital in Sonthofen, Bavaria. In 2007, a nurse was
sentenced for the murder of five of her patients at Charité hospital in Berlin.
Otto Dapunt, a former head of heart
surgery at the Oldenburg clinic who worked with Högel for almost three years,
told the court last year that the nurse had participated with an “above average
regularity” in cases where resuscitation was necessary.
He said that while he had never
considered this to be suspicious – particularly as the nurse was regularly on
call and often had to deal with serious cases – he had often found Högel to be
“overly zealous” in wanting to take care of the more critical patients.
He was also often unusually moved by
the deaths of his patients, Dapunt said, recalling one occasion when the
accused took two patients who had died to the morgue and returned in a “completely
distraught state”.
“But he was factually competent,
perhaps more competent than others,” Dapunt told the court.
Though Högel has already been
sentenced to life in prison, the latest police findings mean it is likely he
will face court again, with charges expected to be filed by spring next year.
Source: The Guardian
posted by Dr. Mohamed Y. Dualeh @ August 29, 2017
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