GERMANY: German police have arrested a male nurse who has admitted killing at least 29 patients with deadly drug injections.
The 26-year-old man, identified only as Stephan L, was arrested last summer and admitted killing first 10, then 16 patients, in a Bavarian hospital. The victims were aged between 70 and 94.
But now a further investigation has revealed a much wider network of victims and police fear that the man may be the most prolific serial killer in postwar Germany.
"We've never had anything like this," Mr Albert Müller, the police officer heading the investigation, told the Bild newspaper.
He ordered the exhumation of the bodies of 42 former patients of the clinic in Sonthofen, a pretty town near the German Alps. In 23 cases, post-mortem examinations revealed medication in the patients' remains which had not been prescribed while they were receiving treatment in the clinic.
A further 38 patients who died mysteriously while the nurse was working at the hospital were cremated and cannot be examined.
The killings only came to light last year, 18 months after the nurse began working at the hospital, when staff noticed that drugs were missing. Police searched the man's apartment and found the missing drug capsules.
The nurse appears to have used a cocktail of anaesthetics and muscle-relaxants, which he injected into his victims at night between February 2003 and July 2004. He faces six murder charges, 22 manslaughter charges and one charge relating to illegal euthanasia. He also faces a further charge of causing grievous bodily harm.
"The suspect said that his motive was, in all cases, sympathy," said Mr Herbert Pollert, senior state prosecutor in the Bavarian city of Kempten. "He wanted to spare seriously-ill patients further suffering, as there was no possibility of recovery."
Relatives of one of his alleged victims told Bild how the nurse had comforted them on their loss and had then opened the window in the hospital room so, as he reportedly told them, "the soul can get out".