He could be retried in a few months. The Besançon public prosecutor’s office has requested the referral to court of former anesthesiologist Frédéric Péchier, suspected of 30 patient poisonings including 12 fatalities in Besançon clinics, the public prosecutor, Etienne Manteaux, announced this Thursday.
“The prosecution requested the dismissal of Frédéric Péchier for the 30 alleged poisonings corresponding to all of the cases for which he was indicted,” declared the magistrate during a press conference.
The practitioner, aged 52, has continued to proclaim his innocence since the start of this affair. “The facts for which he is indicted have nothing to do with acts of euthanasia,” underlined Mr. Manteaux. “What he is accused of is having poisoned healthy patients, to harm colleagues with whom he was in conflict. » The prosecutor insisted on “the atypical and unusual aspect of the charges weighing on the accused”.
The former anesthetist is suspected of having polluted, between 2008 and 2017, the infusion bags of patients in two private clinics in Besançon to cause cardiac arrests then demonstrate his talents as a resuscitator, but also to discredit colleagues with whom he was in conflict.
Lethal doses
In the vast majority of cases, the experts judged that there were “strong suspicions” – in a few cases “certainties” – that substances in sometimes lethal doses had been administered to patients who came to have operations in the two clinics. Besançon where Mr. Péchier officiated, often for benign interventions.
In total, the anesthesiologist was definitively indicted for 30 cases, including 12 fatalities. For two other cases, due to lack of sufficient charges, Mr. Péchier was placed under the more favorable status of assisted witness.