A French court on Thursday sentenced a doctor to life in jail for poisoning 30 child and adult patients, 12 of whom died, in an alleged attempt to discredit co-workers.
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Frederic Pechier, 53, worked as an anaesthetist in two clinics in the eastern city of Besancon, when patients went into cardiac arrest in suspicious circumstances between 2008 and 2017.
Twelve could not be resuscitated.
Pechier’s youngest alleged victim, four-year-old Teddy, survived two cardiac arrests during a routine tonsil surgery in 2016.
“You will be incarcerated immediately,” presiding judge Delphine Thibierge said.
Pechier, who has denied wrongdoing and not been detained since the start of the probe, appeared unmoved.
The doctor’s oldest alleged victim was 89.
An investigation was launched in 2017, after suspicious cardiac arrests during operations on patients otherwise considered low-risk.
During the more than three-month trial, prosecutors called for Pechier to be jailed for life, saying he “used medicine to kill”.
They say he contaminated IV bags with potassium, local anaesthetics, adrenaline, and even an anticoagulant to trigger cardiac arrest or haemorrhaging in patients being treated by colleagues.
His goal, prosecutors said, was to “psychologically hurt” caregivers with whom he was in conflict and to “feed his thirst for power”.
Pechier had argued during the probe that the majority of poisonings were the result of “medical errors” made by his colleagues.
He admitted during the trial that there had been a person poisoning patients in one of the two clinics where he worked, but said it was not him.
“I am not a poisoner,” he said.
One colleague described Pechier as a very good doctor with an “oversized ego”.
In tears during the trial earlier this month, Pechier recounted trying to kill himself in 2021.
The verdict comes after a court in May sentenced retired doctor Joel 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 questions about how he was allowed to continue practising until retirement despite at least one colleague sounding the alarm.
Berlin Case
The development came more than five months after a German doctor went on trial accused of killing 15 patients with lethal injections and acting as “master of life and death” over those in his care.
The 40-year-old palliative care specialist, named by German media as Johannes M., is alleged to have killed 12 women and three men between September 2021 and July 2024 while working in Berlin.
The doctor was accused of injecting the victims, aged between 25 and 94, with deadly cocktails of sedatives and, in some cases, setting fire to their homes in a bid to cover up his crimes.
The accused was said to have “visited his patients under the pretext of providing medical care”, prosecutor Philipp Meyhoefer said at the opening of the trial at the state court in Berlin.
Johannes M. had organised “home visits… with the intention of killing” and exploited his patients’ trust in him as a doctor, Meyhoefer said.
“He acted with disregard for life… and behaved as the master of life and death.”
A co-worker first raised the alarm over Johannes M. last July after becoming suspicious that so many of his patients had died in fires, according to Die Zeit newspaper.
The suspect was arrested in August, with prosecutors initially linking him to four deaths.
But subsequent investigations uncovered a host of other suspicious cases, and in April prosecutors charged Johannes M. with 15 counts of murder.
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