Besan§on: A French doctor accused of poisoning 30 patients and killing 12 of them has insisted he is innocent as his trial opened on Monday. As an anaesthetist, the accused is alleged to have deliberately administered high doses of toxic substances to patients aged between 4 and 89 at two private clinics between 2008 and 2017, causing cardiac arrest in each case. A total of 12 of the patients died. In 23 of the cases, the accused allegedly tried to resuscitate the patients.
According to Ghana News Agency, even before his first statement in court in Besan§on in eastern France, the accused maintained his innocence. There was no proof that any of the cases actually involved poisoning, the defendant claimed in an interview broadcast by RTL on Monday. 'I understand the suffering of the families, but I am not responsible for their suffering,' the 53-year-old asserted.
When the investigation began in 2017, the investigators examined numerous cases in the past of cardiac arrests during everyday operations on people who were actually perfectly healthy and repeatedly came across traces of high-dose medication and substances that had no place in the patients' infusions. For example, a 53-year-old man died during a kidney operation, and a 50-year-old woman died during an operation on her shoulder. Four dead patients were even exhumed, and toxins were detected.
Investigators suspect that the anaesthetist deliberately endangered or killed patients of doctors with whom he was involved in a personal dispute or rivalry. In this way, he wanted to damage their reputation and discredit them. The defendant himself presented himself as the victim of a plot by other doctors.
