A nurse has told a German court that he fatally poisoned more than 100 patients over five years.
Niels Hoegel, 41, is already serving a life sentence on charges of murder and attempted murder for deaths that occurred while he was working at two hospitals in northern Germany between 2000 and 2005.
He is now charged with a further 97 murders, having confessed to a prison psychologist that the true extent of his killing spree was far larger than supposed.
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Today, in front of a courtroom packed with relatives of the deceased, Hoegel answered “yes” when asked if the charges against him were accurate.
“What I have admitted took place,” he said.
Hoegel deliberately injected patients in his care with powerful medications which he knew would send them into cardiac arrest, “in an attempt to show off his resuscitation skills to colleagues and fight off boredom”, says CNN.
In earlier hearings, Hoegel said he got an adrenaline rush from trying to revive his victims and felt “euphoric when he managed to bring a patient back to life, and devastated when he failed”.
His deadly spree came to an end in 2005, when he was caught attempting to inject an unprescribed drug into a patient at Delmenhorst hospital.
However, a police investigation concluded that he could have been stopped earlier if the two hospitals had not “failed to report the disturbing increase in fatalities when Högel was working”, says Deutsche Welle.
He is believed to be the most prolific serial killer in modern German history. So far, police have exhumed 130 bodies of patients who died under his care, and investigators say it may be impossible to ascertain the true death toll, as the bodies of some potential victims were cremated.
Presiding judge Sebastian Buehrmann “said the main aim of the trial was to establish the full scope of the murder spree”, Sky News reports.
“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.”
