In a gruesome incident that came to light on Monday, police officers in Germany have said a male nurse who was awarded life imprisonment, two years ago for killing two patients with lethal overdose of drug has in fact murdered at least 90 patients in total.
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The accused, a 40-year-old Niels Hoegel was jailed in February 2015 for killing two and for attempting to murder four other Intensive Care Unit patients in the Delmenhorst hospital near the northern city of Bremen.
90 murders in total
However, the police have said that 90 more such murders have come to the fore after forensics experts exhumed and analysed more than 130 bodies.
The experts were left shocked when they were investigating the high death toll recorded at two hospitals where Hoegel had worked between 1999 and 2005.
"The insights we were able to gain are terrifying, they surpass what we could have imagined," said Johann Kuehme, police chief in the city of Oldenburg, where the other hospital is located.
'Post-war Germany's worst killing spree'
Besides the experts, the new information about Hoegel has also shocked the German police.
"The death toll "is unique in the history of the German republic," a chief police investigator in the case, Arne Schmidt was quoted as saying by The Manila Times.
Style of Hoegel's murders
Schmidt also added that Hoegel killed "without a discernible pattern" and preyed especially on those in critical condition.
Earlier, the murder convict had admitted to injecting patients with drugs that would cause heart failure or circulatory collapse. He would then swoop in and try to revive them. If he would be successful he would be hailed among his medical peers as a saviour.
The Manila Times even said the accused had even testified at times he would inject drugs into patients to kill "boredom". He said he felt euphoric when he managed to save a patient and felt devastated when he failed to do so.
It was only when a female nurse caught Hoegol red handed the murders came to light. Though the patient survived, Hoegel was arrested in June 2008 and sentenced to seven and a half years in jail for several cases of attempted murder.
When the news hit the headlines, another woman approached the police with suspicions that her deceased mother was also murdered by Hoegel.
This prompted the authorities to exhume other bodies, which led to the revelations of many other deaths due to drug overdose.
