The death toll of a German nurse, who has been hospitalized for over 100 years, has risen to 300 after he had previously admitted killing 100 patients, police said on Wednesday.
Nils Huigel, a nurse in a court in Oldenburg, Lower Saxony, Germany, admitted Tuesday that more than 100 patients were killed by overdose of drugs, believed to be the worst accident in the country's modern history.
Huigel, 41, is serving a life sentence for six murders and attempted murders in two hospitals between 2000 and 2005.
The court charged Huigel with deliberately injecting patients with overdoses of drugs, only to "prove his ability to bring them back to life," but he failed many times.
When Judge Huigel asked whether the prosecution's claims of responsibility for the deaths of 100 people were correct, he hesitated for a moment before saying, "Yes, that's right."
Police believe Huigel killed the first patient in February 2000 by injecting him with an overdose of medicine, which led to his heart being stopped, although he believed he could bring him back to life.
At the end of 2002, Huigel moved to a new job in the intensive care unit of a hospital in Delmenhurst, where 177 deaths were recorded in 2003, while the number did not exceed 77 before he joined the hospital.
In 2005, the nurse was caught and interested in giving an unlicensed syringe to a patient. Three years later, he was sentenced to seven and a half years in prison for attempted murder.
The police then extracted 134 bodies from 67 graveyards treated by Huigel, some in other countries such as Poland and Turkey, for toxicity tests.
The trial of Huigel received much attention from the press and the bereaved relatives, with the trial transferred to a 350-seat auditorium. The judge opened the session with a minute of silence over the victims' lives.
