The World - News from April 9, 1989

Three nurses in one of Vienna’s oldest hospitals have been arrested on suspicion of killing up to 35 patients with drug overdoses, Austrian authorities said. The newspaper Die Presse said it was “the biggest mass killing in Austria’s criminal history.” Vienna Police Chief Guenther Boegl said the three female nurses, ranging in age from 26 to 30, worked in the Lainz Hospital on the city’s western outskirts and have admitted killing a number of patients with lethal injections that included insulin, normally used to treat diabetes. “It appears they acted out of a misguided sense of mercy, but we are also investigating other motives,” Boegl said. “Not all the patients were terminally ill.”