German nurse jailed for life for five murders

BERLIN, June 29 (Reuters) A German court sentenced a nurse to life imprisonment today for murdering five patients at the major Berlin hospital where she worked.

The Berlin court said the 55-year-old female nurse, dubbed by media the ''Angel of Death'', had injected the patients with lethal overdoses of medicine at Berlin's Charite hospital between June 2005 and October 2006.

The divorced and childless nurse, who had worked at the hospital for 10 years, had admitted to manslaughter on four counts.

During her trial, she described her actions as an ''absurd mistake'' and said she had believed she was acting in accordance with the wishes of the patients, all of whom had been seriously ill before she intervened.

She had asked the victims' families for forgiveness.

The hospital reviewed more than 130 deaths after suspicions were aroused last October.

Prosecutors, who accused her of six murders and one attempted murder, said she had ''played God with life and death''.

The case is the latest in a string of similar incidents in Germany.

In the country's biggest case of serial killings since World War Two, a male nurse in the Bavarian town of Sonthofen was sentenced to life in prison last November for killing 28 patients with a cocktail of lethal drugs.

In February last year, a 27-year-old nurse was sentenced to life for killing nine female patients in a nursing home near Bonn.

REUTERS SKB PM1706