The German justice announced, this Thursday, to have imprisoned a nurse suspected of wanting to poison newborns by administering them morphine at the maternity.
“An arrest warrant has been issued against the nurse for attempted murder and serious injury in five cases,” Christof Lehr, the prosecutor for the city of Ulm in southern Germany, told reporters. the facts took place in a maternity hospital.
The “young woman”, placed on remand on Wednesday, is suspected of having “acted intentionally”, he added, believing that she was aware of the fact that the children could die. The applicant denies the facts alleged against her.
Traces of morphine and a syringe found
The events took place during the night of December 19 to 20. Five infants, one day to five weeks old, were taken “almost at the same time” from acute, potentially fatal respiratory problems. They were saved thanks to the medical team’s emergency intervention.
Doctors initially thought of an infection, which babies’ urine tests nevertheless excluded, said police chief Bernhard Weber.
Further analysis revealed traces of morphine, sometimes used to treat withdrawal symptoms in babies whose mothers take drugs. But none of the babies in question were supposed to receive them, the hospital said, which led to a complaint on January 17.
Investigators on Tuesday searched the cases and lockers of those present that night and discovered an oral syringe containing breast milk in that of the accused nurse. The tests confirmed “the terrible suspicion: the syringe contained morphine,” said Bernhard Weber.
The investigation, however, has only just begun, authorities said, noting in particular that the syringe may also have been placed in the locker by another person to cloud the tracks.
“Criminal energy”
“We are all upset,” especially the 400 people working in the children’s department of the hospital, said its director Klaus-Michael Debatin. “We are entitled to believe that an act of criminal energy has been committed,” he said.
According to the hospital, the children will not develop any after-effects from the incident.
“We regret such a thing and apologize to parents and children,” said director Udo Kaisers, vowing to work “hard” to restore the lost trust.
The case recalls another case in Germany, that of a nurse in Marburg, convicted of having administered sedatives to three premature babies between December 2015 and February 2016.
The young woman, who according to justice wanted to demonstrate her talent for saving lives, was sentenced to life imprisonment for attempted murder in 2019.
Germany has been rocked by several serial hospital crime scandals in recent years. The most striking case is that of Niels Högel, an ex-nurse suffering from “a severe narcissistic disorder” according to psychiatrists, sentenced to life in June for the murder of at least 85 patients in total in two hospitals in Basse -Saxony, region of north-west Germany.
Nicknamed “the Angel of Death”, another nurse, Stephan Letter, had been sentenced to the same sentence in 2006 for having killed 28 patients in Bavaria. A year earlier, a nurse at the prestigious Charity Hospital in Berlin also received life in prison for the overdose murder of five patients.
And a trial is currently taking place again in Bavaria, in Munich, against a former home nurse this time, suspected of having killed at least six patients by insulin overdose.
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