3 Nurses Held in 35 Suspected Overdose Deaths

At least three nurses in one of Vienna’s oldest hospitals have been arrested on suspicion of killing up to 35 patients with drug overdoses, authorities said Saturday.

“We have not finished our investigations and it is possible that more arrests will be made,” Vienna police chief Guenther Boegl said in a radio interview.

“We are working on the assumption that as many as 35 patients could have been killed by overdoses of medicines over many months,” he added.

The daily Die Presse said it was “the biggest mass killing in Austria’s criminal history.”

Boegl said the three women nurses, aged between 26 and 30, who worked in the Lainz hospital on the western outskirts of Vienna, had admitted killing a number of patients with lethal injections including insulin, normally used to treat diabetes.

They were arrested Friday after police were called in to investigate an unusually high percentage of deaths in one part of the hospital by the department’s head, Franz Pesendorfer.

Boegl said the three had admitted administering overdoses of drugs to terminally ill elderly patients in great pain.

“It appears they acted out of a misguided sense of mercy, but we are also investigating other possible motives,” he said, adding: “Not all the patients were terminally ill.”

He would not comment on whether the deaths were mercy-killings or murder to lessen the nurses’ workloads.

Some of the victims might have been killed by “other means,” he said without specifying, but added that so far police had no evidence of direct physical violence.

“Even administering drugs to helpless patients can be termed violence,” he said.