A French courtroom on Thursday sentenced a health care provider to life in jail for poisoning 30 youngster and grownup sufferers, 12 of whom died, in an alleged try and discredit co-workers.
Frédéric Péchier, 53, labored as an anaesthetist in two clinics within the jap metropolis of Besançon, when sufferers went into cardiac arrest in suspicious circumstances between 2008 and 2017. Twelve couldn’t be resuscitated.
Péchier’s youngest alleged sufferer, four-year-old Teddy, survived two cardiac arrests throughout a routine tonsil surgical procedure in 2016.
“You shall be incarcerated instantly,” presiding decide Delphine Thibierge stated.
Péchier, who has denied wrongdoing and never been detained because the begin of the probe, appeared unmoved.
The physician’s oldest alleged sufferer was 89.
An investigation was launched in 2017, after suspicious cardiac arrests throughout operations on sufferers in any other case thought-about low-risk.
During the greater than three-month trial, prosecutors referred to as for Péchier to be jailed for all times, saying he “used medication to kill”.
They say he contaminated IV luggage with potassium, native anaesthetics, adrenaline, and even an anticoagulant to set off cardiac arrest or haemorrhaging in sufferers being handled by colleagues.
His objective, prosecutors stated, was to “psychologically harm” caregivers with whom he was in battle and to “feed his thirst for energy”.
Péchier had argued through the probe that almost all of poisonings had been the results of “medical errors” made by his colleagues.
He admitted through the trial that there had been an individual poisoning sufferers in one of many two clinics the place he labored, however stated it was not him.
“I’m not a poisoner,” he stated.
One colleague described Péchier as an excellent physician with an “outsized ego”.
In tears through the trial earlier this month, Péchier recounted attempting to kill himself in 2021.
The verdict comes after a courtroom in May sentenced retired physician Joel Le Scouarnec to twenty years in jail after he confessed to sexually abusing or raping 298 sufferers, most of them youngsters, between 1989 and 2014.
That case raised questions on how he was allowed to proceed practising till retirement regardless of a minimum of one colleague sounding the alarm.
