BERLIN: A German palliative care doctor was sentenced to life in prison on Wednesday for murdering 15 people with lethal doses of sedatives, and he remains under investigation for dozens more killings.
The court in Berlin convicted the 41-year-old of killing 12 women and three men during home visits between September 2021 and July 2024.
But presiding judge Sylvia Busch said the conviction for 15 murders may well be only a glimpse of his many crimes.
Prosecutors said during the proceedings that he was suspected of having killed more than 70 other people.
Detained in 2024, he is only partially identified in court records as Johannes M.
Busch described the man as a “serial killer” at the centre of an “unfathomable” and “extraordinary” case.
And as the court found his crimes carried a “particular gravity of guilt”, he was given the harshest possible sentence, making it much more difficult for him to ever win release.
The court also banned him from ever again practising medicine.
The court ruled that he had killed not out of any compassion for his patients or a misguided sense of assisted dying, but instead by a drive for power over his victims.
Prosecutors had described the killer as having “a lust for murder”, saying the physician had had “no other motive for killing these people than the act of killing itself”.
The victims, all of whom were under his medical care at the time, ranged in age from 25 to 94.
The court found that he intentionally administered an anaesthetic and a muscle relaxant that “paralysed the respiratory muscles, leading to respiratory arrest and death within minutes”.
