MUNICH — A German who cared for palliative patients is facing charges after allegedly murdering more than a dozen people using a nursing service and then setting fire to some of their homes to cover up the crime, prosecutors said.
The doctor, who was not named due to German privacy laws, was arrested in August on a warrant that was “repeatedly amended” as the investigation went on, the Berlin Public Prosecutor’s Office said.
There were four known cases mentioned by authorities at the time of his arrest last year. On Wednesday, the office announced it filed 15 counts of murder with malice against the 40-year-old.
“To commit the crimes, he is alleged to have administered an anesthetic inducer and then a muscle relaxant to his patients without medical indication and without their knowledge and consent,” the prosecutor’s office said.
Death occurred within a few minutes, prosecutors said, because the muscle relaxant paralyzed the respiratory muscle and caused respiratory arrest.
All of the patients, ranging in age from 25 to 94, were using a nursing service that the doctor worked with and died between September 2021 and July 2024.
The first known death he was charged with was a 25-year-old woman who died on Sept. 22, 2021, in Berlin-Buckow. No details were provided about her death.
Some of the details German prosecutors provided included accusations that the doctor set fire to the patients’ residences after injecting them with the drug cocktail.
This includes the death of an 87-year-old woman in Neukölln. He is alleged to have set fire to her apartment on June 11, 2024, but when the fire department arrived, paramedics were able to revive the woman at the scene, the prosecutor’s office said. She died a short time later at the hospital.
Weeks later, the doctor allegedly killed two people on the same day. The first was a 75-year-old man in his apartment on the morning of July 8, 2024, in Kreuzberg, prosecutors said.
He then went to the apartment of a 76-year-old woman in Neukölln just hours later.
“His attempt to set the apartment on fire is said to have failed, as the fire extinguished itself,” prosecutors said. “When he noticed this, he allegedly informed a relative of the woman and claimed that he was standing in front of her apartment and no one was responding to the doorbell.”
Berlin police and prosecutors have examined 395 cases, and suspicion was “confirmed” in at least 95 cases. The prosecutor’s office said another 75 investigations are still ongoing.
At least 12 bodies have been exhumed in connection with the doctor’s case, and five of those cases were included in the indictment, prosecutors said.
The doctor has not made a statement in the case and his attorney has not been identified.
Due to the severity of the allegations, prosecutors said they are seeking not only a conviction in his case but also a “lifelong professional ban and subsequent preventive detention.”
A German nurse, Niels Hoegel, was sentenced to life in prison in 2019 for murdering 85 patients. At one of his first trials, Hoegel said that he intentionally put his patients in cardiac arrest because he liked the feeling of resuscitating them.
At the time of his sentencing, it was believed that he was the worst serial killer in German history.
Carlo Angerer reported from Munich, Germany. Doha Madani reported from New York City, New York.
