2 days ago
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Prosecutors have charged a Berlin palliative care doctor with the murder of 15 patients, alleging he acted out of a “lust” for killing.
The 40-year-old suspect is accused of killing 12 women and three men between September 2021 and July 2024 using a deadly cocktail of sedatives. German press reports identified the suspect as Johannes M, but prosecutors have not released a name.
The doctor allegedly “administered an anaesthetic and a muscle relaxant to his patients … without their knowledge or consent”, the Berlin prosecutor’s office said in a statement.
The relaxant “paralysed the respiratory muscles, leading to respiratory arrest and death within minutes”. The patients were between 25 and 94 years old.
On five occasions, prosecutors allege, the suspect “set fire to their apartments to cover up these killings”.
The suspect is accused of killing two patients on the same day. On the morning of 8 July 2024 he is alleged to have killed a 75-year-old man at his home in the central Berlin district of Kreuzberg. A few hours later he allegedly struck again, killing a 76-year-old woman in the neighbouring Neukölln district.
The suspect’s alleged attempt to incinerate the crime scene failed when the fire did not catch, prosecutors said. “When he noticed this, he reportedly informed a relative of the woman, claiming that he was standing in front of her apartment and that no one had responded to his ringing,” they said.
The list of accusations against the suspect has grown in length and severity since his initial arrest in August. The suspect was originally held on suspicion of manslaughter in relation to four deaths.
Prosecutors said in November they were treating the alleged killings as murder cases and added four more deaths to the list of accusations.
“The accused appears to have had no motive for killing the people other than the act of killing itself,” prosecutors said at the time. The suspect had nothing other than a “lust for murder”, they said.
The updated charge sheet, extended to cover 15 suspicious deaths, accuses the suspect of carrying out the murders with “malice aforethought”.
Prosecutors said they were seeking a lifelong professional ban and called for the suspect to be held in preventive detention.
A special team of investigators had identified a total of 395 suspicious cases that needed to be re-examined in light of the accusations against the doctor. In 95 cases, an initial suspicion had been confirmed and preliminary proceedings had been initiated. Another 75 were still being assessed.
In the course of the investigation, 12 exhumations have been carried out, five of which related to the victims listed in the charges. Another five exhumations are planned to go ahead shortly.
The allegations made against the doctor recall another case currently being tried in Germany, in which a nurse is accused of murdering nine patients in palliative care.
The nurse, whose trial opened in March, is alleged to have injected a total of 26 patients with large doses of sedatives or painkillers, resulting in the deaths of nine.
Prosecutors on the case, being heard in the western city of Aachen, said the suspect was motivated by a desire to reduce his workload on night shifts and had considered himself the “master of life and death”.
