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Topics: France, Crime, News, Court, World News
Niamh Shackleton
Topics: France, Crime, News, Court, World News
A French anesthetist has been accused of poisoning 30 patients, one as young as four years old.
Frédéric Péchier, 53, had been working at two clinics across Besançon, France, when dozens of patients went into cardiac arrest in suspicious circumstances.
30 patients are suspected of being poisoned which led to their respective heart attacks - 12 of whom could not be saved.
The anesthetist allegedly triggered the heart attacks as a way of showing off his resuscitation skills and to discredit his colleagues.
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The youngest alleged victim was a four-year-old boy called Teddy, who survived two cardiac arrests during a routine tonsil operation in 2016.
The eldest of his alleged victims was an 89-year-old.
Péchier went on to be accused of poisoning the patients and was first charged in 2019. Now, after years of investigations, his trial has finally begun.
As to how Péchier supposedly poisoned his alleged victims, he's said to have tampered with the patients' IV bags.
Péchier faces life imprisonment if found guilty of the crimes he's facing.
The Frenchman maintains his innocence, however, and says that there was 'no proof of any poisoning', per BBC News. He also insists that he's the victim of a group of jealous colleagues.
Péchier's trial is expected to last longer than three months as it involves more than 150 civil parties who are representing the victims allegedly poisoned by him.
A whopping 170 witnesses and experts will reportedly take the stand over the coming weeks.
The man's trial comes after a staggering eight years of investigations. His lawyer, Maître Randall Schwerdorffer, has argued that the prosecution doesn't have clear evidence against Péchier.
"If Frédéric Péchier has never been placed in detention, it is because the evidence being used against him is not that clear, far from it," he said, Radio France reported.
Schwerdorffer went on: "There were all the means to place Frédéric Pécher in detention: the disturbance of public order, the risk of repetition... We have always had judges who, at one point, said: it's not possible, there is a problem in the case."
But prosecutors argue that Péchier is the common denominator in the 30 unusual instances.
Prosecutor Etienne Manteaux told the court (via Metro Online): "What Péchier is accused of is poisoning healthy patients in order to harm colleagues with whom he was in conflict.
"He was the first responder when cardiac arrest occurred. He always had a solution."