A French court on Thursday sentenced a doctor to life imprisonment for poisoning 30 child and adult patients, 12 of whom died, in what prosecutors said was an attempt to discredit and psychologically harm his colleagues.
Gatekeepers News reports that Frédéric Péchier, 53, an anaesthetist who worked in two clinics in the eastern city of Besançon, was found guilty over a series of suspicious cardiac arrests that occurred between 2008 and 2017 during routine medical procedures.
Twelve of the patients could not be resuscitated. The youngest victim, four-year-old Teddy, survived two cardiac arrests during a routine tonsil operation in 2016, while the oldest alleged victim was 89 years old.
Delivering the verdict, presiding judge Delphine Thibierge ordered Péchier’s immediate incarceration.
“You will be incarcerated immediately,” the judge said.
Péchier, who has consistently denied any wrongdoing and had remained free during the investigation, appeared unmoved by the sentence.
The case came to light in 2017 after an unusual number of cardiac arrests occurred during operations on patients deemed to be at low risk.
During the more than three-month trial, prosecutors urged the court to impose a life sentence, arguing that Péchier had deliberately “used medicine to kill.”
They said he contaminated intravenous bags with substances including potassium, local anaesthetics, adrenaline and anticoagulants, triggering cardiac arrests or severe haemorrhaging in patients being treated by his colleagues.
According to prosecutors, his motive was to “psychologically hurt” caregivers with whom he was in conflict and to “feed his thirst for power.”
Péchier countered that most of the poisonings were the result of medical errors by colleagues. While he admitted that someone had poisoned patients at one of the clinics, he insisted it was not him.
“I am not a poisoner,” he told the court.
One colleague described Péchier as a very competent doctor with an “oversized ego.” Earlier this month, the accused broke down in tears during the trial, recounting a suicide attempt in 2021.
The verdict follows another high-profile medical abuse case in France. In May, a court sentenced retired doctor Joël Le Scouarnec to 20 years in prison after he confessed to sexually abusing or raping 298 patients, most of them children, between 1989 and 2014. That case raised serious questions about oversight failures within the medical system.
Berlin Case
The ruling comes more than five months after a German doctor went on trial accused of killing 15 patients with lethal injections while working in Berlin.
The 40-year-old palliative care specialist, identified by German media as Johannes M., is accused of killing 12 women and three men between September 2021 and July 2024.
Prosecutors allege that he injected victims aged 25 to 94 with deadly combinations of sedatives and, in some cases, set fire to their homes in an attempt to destroy evidence.
“He visited his patients under the pretext of providing medical care,” prosecutor Philipp Meyhoefer said at the opening of the trial at Berlin’s state court.
Johannes M. allegedly organised home visits “with the intention of killing” and abused the trust placed in him as a medical professional.
“He acted with disregard for life… and behaved as the master of life and death,” Meyhoefer said.
A co-worker reportedly raised the alarm in July after noticing a suspicious pattern of patient deaths linked to fires, according to Die Zeit newspaper.
The suspect was arrested in August, initially in connection with four deaths. Further investigations later linked him to additional cases, leading prosecutors in April to file 15 counts of murder.
— AFP
