Jailed German male nurse suspected of murdering at least 90 patients

Niels Högel, 40, was jailed for life in February 2015 for killing at least two intensive care patients at Delmenhorst hospital in northern Germany.

He was also charged with 'attempt to murder' of other patients in the same facility.

However, police have said that they have found another 88 cases after going through hundreds of files and exhuming more than 130 bodies in Germany, Poland and Turkey, where he worked.

"The death toll is unique in the history of the German republic," police said, adding that the death toll might be bigger as several of the deceased were cremated.

"There was evidence for at least 90 murders, and at least as many [suspected] cases again that can no longer be proven," chief police investigator, Arne Schmidt told the media.

Schmidt said that he himself was shocked by the findings.

Germany's Bild newspaper has already tagged Högel as the country's 'worst serial killer'.

Police said that he carried out his first murder in February 2000 and after killing at least another 35 patients at a clinic in Oldenburg in Lower Saxony, within two years, he moved to to a hospital in Delmenhorst near the north-western city of Bremen.

"Högel would inject patients’ veins with a cardiovascular drug in order to orchestrate medical emergencies that would require him to step in and resuscitate them in the hospital’s intensive care unit," a report in The Guardian read.

According to the investigation, the number of intensive unit deaths doubled (from five percent to ten percent) at the Delmenhorst clinic.

Högel would mostly use five different drugs including ajmaline, sotalol, lidocaine, amiodarone and calcium chloride, the report read.

An overdose of any of these is lethal enough to kill a patient.

However, the report also pointed out the lack of action on behalf of the hospital administrations where he worked.

Johann Kühme, Oldenburg’s head of police, believes that the 'murders could have been prevented', if the authorities would have acted faster.

"People at the clinic in Oldenburg knew of the abnormalities,” he added.

In January 2015, when the case was brought back to court, the convict confessed to killing 30 patients but said he wasn't responsible for any more deaths.

Even though similar cases have shaken Germany in the last two decades, the magnanimity of  this is unmatched.

In 2006, a male nurse was sentenced to life for murdering 29 patients at a hospital in Sonthofen, Bavaria.

A year later, a nurse was sentenced for the murder of five of her patients at Charité hospital in Berlin.

Image: Screengrab from youTube