German killer nurse murdered ‘at least 90 patients’

A male nurse jailed for life two years ago for killing two hospital patients with lethal drug overdoses murdered at least 90 patients in total, and possibly twice as many, police say Monday, calling it post-war Germany’s worst killing spree.

Niels Hoegel, 40, was jailed in February 2015 for two murders and four counts of attempted murder or causing bodily harm on intensive-care patients at the Delmenhorst hospital near the northern city of Bremen.

Police say Monday that forensics experts had since exhumed and analyzed more than 130 additional bodies and had found evidence of a vastly higher death toll at two hospitals where Hoegel had worked between 1999 and 2005.

“The insights we were able to gain are terrifying, they surpass what we could have imagined,” says Johann Kuehme, police chief in the city of Oldenburg, where the other hospital is located.

The death toll “is unique in the history of the German republic,” says the chief police investigator in the case, Arne Schmidt, adding that Hoegel killed “without a discernable pattern” and preyed especially on those in critical condition.

— AFP