German killer nurse suspected to have killed 86 patients

FRANKFURT – A male nurse, identified as Niels Hoegel, who was convicted in 2015 of killing two patients in Germany with overdoses of heart medication is now believed to have killed 86 patients. According to police investigation on Monday, he has confessed in many of the cases and the true scale of his crime could even be larger as he could not remember all the details of what he did, and some possible victims were cremated, making it impossible to gather evidence.

In past hearings, Hoegel admitted deliberately injecting patients at a hospital in the northwesten town of Delmenhorts with deadly drugs and then trying to revive them in order to play hero, German broadcaster NDR said. German prosecutors have long said they believed he killed many more people at the time he was jailed in 2015. Many of these could have been prevented if health authorities had acted faster on their suspicions, said Johann Kuehme, police chief in the city of Oldenburg. Kuehme said that authorities have now unearthed evidence of 84 killings, exhuming bodies of former patients in Delmenhorst and nearby Oldenburg, in addition to the ones for which Hoegel was convicted.