- Suspected reportedly killed 12 women and 3 men between 2021 and 2024.
- The doctor arrested in August with prosecutors connecting him with four deaths.
- Another 96 cases are still being investigated, prosecution says Spox.
A German doctor will go to trial on Monday for killing 15 patients with deadly injections, in what investigators may just fear is just the top of a deadly iceberg.
The 40-year-old palliative care specialist, named by German media such as Johannes M, is accused of killing 12 women and three men between September 2021 and July 2024 while working in Berlin.
He allegedly injured the victims aged 25 and 94 with a deadly cocktail of sedatives and in some cases put their homes in an attempt to cover his crimes.
One employee first raised the alarm about Johannes M last July after being suspicious of the fact that so many of his patients had died in fires, according to Die Zeit newspaper.
He was arrested in August, when prosecutors initially associate him with four deaths.
But investigations threw a number of other suspicious cases, and in April, prosecutors accused John M with 15 counts with murder.
Another 96 cases are still being investigated, told a prosecution spokesman AFPIncluding the death of John Ms Mother -in -law.
She had suffered from cancer and died mysteriously the same weekend that Johannes M and his wife visited her in Poland in the early 2024, according to media reports.
Muscle relaxant
The suspect, called “Doctor Death” of German media, was allegedly trained as a radiologist and a practitioner before continuing to specialize in palliative care.
According to Die Zeithe submitted a doctoral dissertation in 2013 and looked at the motives behind a series of killings in Frankfurt, which opened with the words “Why kill people?”
Prosecutors say that in all 15 cases, Johannes M “administered an anesthetic and a muscle relaxant for his patients … without their knowledge or consent”.
The relaxing “paralyzed the airway muscles, which led to airway arrest and death within minutes”.
In five cases, Johannes M allegedly set fire to the victims’ apartments after administering injections.
On one occasion, he is accused of murdering two patients on the same day.
On the morning of July 8, 2024, he allegedly killed a 75-year-old man in his home in the Berlin district of Kreuzberg.
“A few hours later” he is said to have beaten again and killed a 76-year-old woman in the nearby Neukoelln district.
Prosecutors say he started a fire in the woman’s apartment, but it went out.
“When he realized this, he allegedly stated a relative of the woman and claimed he was standing in front of her apartment and that no one answered the doorbell,” prosecutors said.
In another case, Johannes M “mistakenly claimed to have begun to revive effort” on a 56 -year -old victim, originally kept alive by rescuers, but died three days later in the hospital.
‘No motive other than to kill’
Johannes M has not commented on the accusations against him.
Prosecutors say he had no “any motive beyond killing” and is looking for a lifetime.
The case recalls that the notorious German nurse Niels Hoegel, who received a life sentence in 2019 for murdering 85 patients.
Hoegel, assumed to be Germany’s most productive serial killer, murdered hospital patients with deadly injections between 2000 and 2005 before eventually caught in the action.
Recently, a 27-year-old nurse received a life sentence in 2023 for having murdered two patients by deliberately administering unspoken drugs.
In March, another nurse for a trial in Aachen, accused of having injected 26 patients with large doses of sedatives or painkillers, resulted in nine deaths.
Last week, the German police revealed that they are examining another doctor who is suspected of killing several mainly elderly patients.
Investigators “undergo” deaths associated with the doctor from the city of Pinneberg in Northern Germany, just outside Hamburg, police and prosecutors said.
