In Saarland, the prosecutor investigates a nurse who is said to have murdered at least five patients by mid-2016. The case is reminiscent of the murder series of the now convicted serial killer Niels Högel.
According to the public prosecutor Saarbrücken, the investigations against the caregiver have been going on for more than three years. The 27-year-old Daniel B. is said to have worked for a few weeks in the University Hospital Homburg / Saar, previously he was employed in a Völklingen clinic. Investigators accuse him of putting patients in the intensive care unit into a life-threatening condition with medications and then reanimating them - or at least trying them. The resuscitation attempts apparently failed several times: in five cases is determined for murder against B., in two other cases for attempted murder.
The investigators came to track him in June 2016. At that time B. was to appear in the early morning hours in an ambulance jacket in the intensive care unit of the hospital in Saarburg in Rhineland-Palatinate. He had pretended to be a doctor and had a defibrillator for resuscitation. However, the nursing staff in Saarburg refused the patient contact and turned on the police.
According to the prosecution, it turned out during a review that B. was not a doctor, but a nurse in the intensive care unit of the University Hospital Homburg. There were apparently internal investigations against B., because he was suspected of having given a patient an unrecorded drug. The convicted former nurse Niels Högel killed dozens of patients in Oldenburg and Delmenhorst using similar methods.
Since 2016, seven former patients who died after contact with B. exhumed and their bodies were examined in legal medicine, the investigators. In six of these patients were active ingredients of two cardiac drugs and a strong tranquilizer, which were not prescribed by a doctor. (Read an expert interview on why helpers turn into murderers.)
So far, the caretaker has not commented on the allegations, the prosecutor said. He has already been convicted of fraud and is detained. According to the investigators B. was employed from January 2015 to March 2016 in Völklingen, then in Homburg. The Saarland broadcasting reports that B. had previously been employed at clinics in Frankfurt and Wiesbaden, the Hessian authorities were informed.