Former anesthetist Frédéric Péchier sent to court for poisoning 30 patients

Frédéric Péchier will be tried before the Doubs Assize Court for the poisoning of 30 patients, including 12 fatalities, in clinics in Besançon, announced on Monday, August 5, the public prosecutor Etienne Manteaux to the AFP.The magistrates signed the indictment order before the Assize Court, a 369-page document that summarizes more than seven years of investigation, as well as the charges against Frédéric Péchier, 52 years old. The latter has always maintained his innocence. He faces life imprisonment, specifies the prosecutor of Besançon.

The case began when an anesthesiologist at one of the clinics where Frédéric Péchier worked raised the alarm after three unexplained cardiac arrests of patients during surgery. He is suspected of having contaminated, between October 10, 2008 and January 20, 2017, the perfusion bags of patients in two private clinics in Besançon, in order to cause cardiac arrests and demonstrate his talents as a resuscitation specialist, but also to discredit colleagues with whom he was in conflict. In the vast majority of cases, the expert reports found that there were “strong suspicions” that substances in sometimes lethal doses had been administered to patients who came for surgery in the two clinics where the practitioner worked, often for minor procedures.

This file is “unprecedented” in the annals of French justice. “We are not at all in a euthanasia framework”insisted Etienne Manteaux. “It’s totally unique”because the facts alleged were not intended to “poison to end the suffering of patients.” The defense now has ten days to contest this postponement, said the prosecutor, who was unable to give a date for the trial, which in any case cannot be held before next year.