SOMALINET NEWS ...Archives
GERMANY: SERIAL KILLER ARRESTED November 20, 2006
Zainab Osman
(SomaliNet) A nurse was convicted Monday of killing 28 of his patients at a hospital in southern Germany and sentenced to life in prison.
Stephan Letter was found guilty of 12 counts of murder, 15 of manslaughter and one mercy killing in what has been described as Germany's biggest series of killings since World War II. He confessed to the murder but said that he could not remember how many.
According to evidence presented at his nine-month trial, Letter, 28, killed his victims by injecting a cocktail of drugs. Letter's attorney, Juergen Fischer, had argued that his client was motivated by compassion for seriously ill patients.
The deaths at the hospital in Sonthofen began in February 2003, less than a month after the nurse started working there. The last suspicious death occurred in July 2004, just before his arrest.
The patients were aged between 40 and 94, though most were older than 75. They included two gravely ill women, aged 40 and 47, but not all were seriously sick, authorities have said.