Former nurse admits at trial to killing 100 patients in Germany

AGERMANY former nurse accused of killing 100 patients in his care admitted yesterday to the murders on the first day of his trial in the biggest serial killing case in the country’s post-war history.

Asked by the presiding judge at the court in the northern city of Oldenburg whether the charges against him were accurate, Niels Hoegel replied, “Yes”.

“What I have admitted took place,” the 41-year-old told the courtroom crowded with dozens of grieving relatives.

Hoegel has already spent nearly a decade in prison on a life term for other patient deaths, and is accused of intentionally administering medical overdoses to victims so he could bring them back to life at the last moment. As the proceedings began in the northern city of Oldenburg, presiding judge Sebastian Buehrmann said the main aim of the trial was to establish the full scope of the murder spree that was allowed to go unchecked for years at two German hospitals.

“We will do our utmost to learn the truth,” he said. “It is like a house with dark rooms, we want to bring light into the darkness.”

After a minute of silence for the victims, the bearded, heavyset Hoegel listened impassively, his head lowered, as public prosecutor Daniela Schiereck-bohlmann read out the name of each dead patient and the charges against the defendant.

Prosecutors say at least 36 patients were killed at a hospital in Oldenburg where he worked, and about 64 more at a clinic in nearby Delmenhorst, between 2000 and 2005.

More than 130 bodies of patients who died on Hoegel’s watch have been exhumed, in a case investigators have called “unprecedented in Germany to our knowledge”.