An Italian doctor accused of murdering two patients on a coronavirus ward at the peak of the pandemic to free up beds has been arrested.
Carlo Mosca, 47, administered lethal doses of anaesthetics to 61-year-old Natale Bassi and 80-year-old Angelo Paletti at the hospital in Lombardy in March, prosecutors claim.
WhatsApp messages between nurses revealed that they suspected ‘crazy’ Mosca of killing patients ‘to free up the beds’ within the A&E ward which he was responsible of.
Another three deaths are now being probed by police after they claim Mosca altered the medical records of his alleged victims to hide his tracks.
Mosca was arrested and is now under confinement at his home in Mantua. He denies the charges against him, calling the allegations ‘baseless.’
The doctor administered Succinylcholine and Propofol, both of which were used on the ward to anaesthetise covid patients in order that they might be intubated, legal documents say.
Prosecutors say the patients in question were never intubated which Mosca had no reason to use anaesthesia.
An anonymous complaint was made at the end of April and prosecutors have obtained WhatsApp messages which they assert reveal how Mosca tried to have nurses collude with him.
When he acknowledged he was under investigation he asked nurses to ‘agree on a convenient version of the story’ while ‘instigating them to declare falsehoods,’ according to legal documents.
In text messages to each other, the nurses said: ‘Did he ask you to administer the drugs without intubating them?’, ‘I’m not killing patients just because he wants to free up the beds’, and ‘This is crazy.’
The prosecution claims he asked his colleagues to leave the space when he administered the drugs.
‘This has never happened to me before,’ one nurse said.
Bassi, a diabetic who suffered from cardiovascular disease, died on March 20. Two days later Paletti died.
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