A former French anaesthetist has been sentenced to life imprisonment after being found guilty of deliberately poisoning dozens of patients, leading to 12 deaths.
Frédéric Péchier, 53, was convicted on Friday following a four-month trial in Besançon, eastern France. The case is one of the most serious medical scandals in the country’s history.
The court found that Péchier intentionally injected dangerous substances, including potassium chloride and adrenaline, into patients’ infusion bags, triggering cardiac arrests or severe haemorrhaging during routine surgical procedures.
Among his victims was a four-year-old child who suffered two cardiac arrests during a tonsil operation in 2016 but survived. The oldest patient affected was 89.
“You are Doctor Death, a poisoner, a murderer. You bring shame on all doctors,” prosecutors told the court last week. “You have turned this clinic into a graveyard.”
In many cases, Péchier was not the lead anaesthetist. Prosecutors said he would arrive early to tamper with infusion bags and later intervene when patients suddenly deteriorated, presenting himself as the doctor who could save them by swiftly diagnosing the problem and administering an antidote.
However, in 12 cases, the intervention came too late, or not at all and the patients died.
The prosecution argued that Péchier’s actions were motivated by resentment toward fellow anaesthetists, whom he allegedly sought to discredit by creating medical emergencies under their watch.
Suspicion first arose in 2017 after unusually high levels of potassium chloride were found in the infusion bag of a woman who suffered a cardiac arrest during back surgery.
Investigators then uncovered a disturbing pattern at the Saint-Vincent private clinic in Besançon.
While the national rate of fatal heart attacks under anaesthesia stood at about one in 100,000, the figure at Saint-Vincent was more than six times higher. Even more troubling, most of those cases lacked any clear medical explanation.
The anomalies reportedly stopped when Péchier briefly left the clinic to work elsewhere, only to resurface at the new location. When he returned to Saint-Vincent, the emergencies resumed.
After he was barred from practising medicine in 2017, the unexplained incidents ceased altogether.
One of the earliest known victims, Sandra Simard, was 36 when she went into cardiac arrest during spinal surgery. She survived after Péchier intervened but fell into a coma.
Tests later revealed potassium levels in her infusion bag that were 100 times the normal dose, prompting prosecutors to open a criminal investigation.
Throughout the 15-week trial, Péchier denied responsibility, even as he acknowledged that some patients may indeed have been poisoned.
“I have said it before and I’ll say it again: I am not a poisoner… I have always upheld the Hippocratic oath,” he told the court.
Despite remaining free during the trial, Péchier will now serve a minimum of 22 years behind bars. He has 10 days to file an appeal, which would trigger a retrial within a year.
Prosecutors said colleagues had viewed Péchier as a problem-solver who always appeared to have the right answer.
According to one prosecutor: “His colleagues said he always seemed to have the answer. That he made himself out to be the best, that he created this character of the saviour, so that colleagues would instinctively turn to him.”
His defence lawyers maintained there was no direct evidence linking him to the poisonings. Péchier himself claimed that while a poisoner must have existed, it was not him.
Born to parents who were both medical professionals, Péchier was described by a court psychologist as having a dual personality — respectable on the surface but capable of extreme harm. He attempted suicide in both 2014 and 2021.
A divorced father of three, Péchier told the court before sentencing that his primary concern was his family. As the verdict was delivered, his children broke down in tears, while he showed no visible emotion.
“It’s the end of a nightmare,” said survivor Sandra Simard after the ruling.
Another survivor, Jean-Claude Gandon, added: “We can have an easier Christmas now.”
