A ‘star’ anaesthetist has been accused of poisoning 30 patients so that he could show off his resuscitation skills.
Frédéric Pechier, 53, is suspected of being the ‘common denominator’ at two clinics in the French city of Besançon where a number of patients went into cardiac arrest in suspicious circumstances between 2008 to 2017.
He is alleged to have polluted the IV bags of dozens of people, 12 of whom could not be saved and died.
His youngest alleged victim – a four-year-old identified as Teddy – survived two cardiac arrests during a routine tonsil operation in 2016. The doctor’s oldest alleged victim was 89.
‘I have never poisoned anyone. I am innocent,’ Perchier declared on the first day of his trial, denying all charges against him.
The trial caps an investigation spanning eight years that has shocked the medical community.
Prosecutor Etienne Manteaux has said the court case is ‘unprecedented in French legal history’.
He alleges that the father-of-three contaminated the IV bags used by his colleagues in an effort to harm them professionally.
Manteaux told the court: ‘What Perchier is accused of is poisoning healthy patients in order to harm colleagues with whom he was in conflict.
‘He was the first responder when cardiac arrest occurred. He always had a solution.’
The doctor has not practiced medicine since 2017 when an investigation was launched after suspicious cardiac arrests during operations on some patients considered low-risk.
Over the course of the inquiry, more than 70 reports of ‘serious adverse events’ – medical jargon for unexpected complications or deaths among patients – have been examines
But he blames ‘medical errors’ by his colleagues for most of the poisonings and is hellbent on proving his innocence.
Some colleagues described Pechier as a ‘star anaesthetist’, while others said he came across as arrogant and manipulative.
One co-worker claimed the anaesthetist was ‘certain he was the best’ and liked to ‘think of himself as Zorro’.
The trial is set to continue until December and involves more than 150 civil parties representing the 30 alleged victims.
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