Four years after the start of the case, which broke out in March 2017 with the indictment of Frédéric Péchier, first for seven, then since 2019 for twenty-four suspected aggravated poisonings, the investigation is now entering its phase final.
A final psychological expert report should be delivered in the coming weeks.
But in this extraordinary and extremely atypical case, it is from science that justice now awaits answers.
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A first medical report was indeed issued in the summer of 2020, without delivering any formal conclusions.
“Incomplete and incomplete” work, regretted Etienne Manteaux, prosecutor of Besançon (Doubs).
A vast second opinion has therefore been entrusted to a new panel of experts, which should deliver its conclusions by summer 2022.
Sorting out the suspected cases
Objective: to understand if the cardiac complications that occurred in these twenty-four patients - nine died of it - can be explained other than by poisoning.
This is the whole difficulty of this case: for lack of having seized the equipment used during the operation in the majority of cases, part of the file is currently based on medical incongruities, in particular this sudden epidemic at the Saint-Vincent clinic of “tako-tsubo”, a severe and extremely rare cardiac deformity… Diagnosis made at the time, for lack of anything better.
Among the forty-three suspected cases initially included in the investigation, the justice had carried out a first "sorting", refocusing in particular on those concomitant to conflicts between Dr Frédéric Péchier and his colleagues, whose patients he would have poisoned out of revenge. .
Depending on the conclusions of the medical expertise, the examining magistrate could still decide to reduce the focal length, and to refer the anesthesiologist to the assizes only for a part of these cases, or even to pronounce a dismissal. The possible trial, lasting six to eight weeks due to the technical nature of the case, would not take place before the fall of 2023. Frédéric Péchier would face life imprisonment.