Péchier case: justice welcomes “major progress” in the investigation of the anesthetist suspected of 30 poisonings

The Frédéric Péchier affair has just experienced a “major step forward“With new expertise and final indictments of the anesthesiologist, now suspected of 30 poisonings of patients in Besançon, including 12 fatalities, while the civil parties await a trial. The public prosecutor of Besançon, Étienne Manteaux welcomed this during a press conference, welcoming the “considerable work (…) accomplished by two expertson the recent filing of thirty-two new expert reports, one on each case of poisoning included in the investigation.

This series of expertise, the third since the opening of this extraordinary file in 2017, served as the basis for the three interrogations carried out in March by the examining magistrate Marjolaine Poinsard, whom the defense wants to challenge. Completed on Wednesday, these hearings saw the indictment of Frédéric Péchier, fifty-one, for six new alleged poisonings of patients. In total, he was indicted definitively for thirty cases, including twelve fatalities. For the two remaining cases, for lack of sufficient charges, Frédéric Péchier was placed under the more favorable status of assisted witness.

He is suspected of having polluted, between 2008 and 2017, the infusion bags of patients in two private clinics in Besançon to cause cardiac arrest and then demonstrate his talents as a resuscitator, but also to discredit colleagues with whom he was in conflict. He never ceases to proclaim his innocence.

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The case began when an anesthetist from a clinic in Besançon sounded the alarm after three unexplained cardiac arrests of patients undergoing surgery.

On Friday, Étienne Manteaux detailed, case by case, the conclusions of the latest expert appraisals. The vast majority of experts judged that there were “strong suspicions– in some cases “certainties– that substances in sometimes lethal doses had been administered to patients who came to have surgery in the two clinics in Besançon where Frédéric Péchier officiated, often for benign interventions. Among the products found in overdose in the analyzes carried out on patients, some of whom, deceased, had to be exhumed: lidocaine, a local anesthetic, or even potassium. Doses of potassium “100 times higherto those expected were thus found in a patient in her thirties, note the experts. A 4-year-old child had also suffered a cardiac arrest and spent two days in a coma.

The presence of Frédéric Péchier when the patients were victims of a serious adverse event (SAE) on the operating table was also noted by several of his anesthetist colleagues, distraught at these brutal SAEs and who saw Dr Péchier come to administer the antidote, underlined the prosecutor. One of them will evoke a Frédéric Péchier “sure to be the best“and who takes himself”for zorro», according to Etienne Manteaux.

“Unprecedented”

After having remained silent during the first two interrogations, Frédéric Péchier incriminated Wednesday during the third his ex-colleagues, assuring that the majority of SAEs resulted from “medical errors” from them. For Frédéric Péchier, the only case of proven poisoning occurred when he anesthetized the patient himself, in January 2017. “He also designated the one who for him was the poisoner in this single case.“, Slipped the prosecutor.

However, the end of the investigation does not yet seem to be in sight, appeals having been filed by the defense, tempered the magistrate, who cannot decide “on the closure of this judicial investigation“, nor give a “probable date“. “What is due to the civil parties today is a trial, that they can have a public debate“, demanded Me Stéphane Giuranna, one of their lawyers, after an information meeting on the file in which about fifty of them participated. “Dr. Péchier can no longer escape his responsibility” in that case “obviously without precedent in our judicial annals“, he added.