Filipino Nurse, Victorino Chua, 49, is charged with murder of three patients (Tracey Arden, 44, Arnold Lancaster, 71, and Derek Weaver, 83) and poisoning of 18 others with an insulin-contaminated saline bags. In addition, he deliberately altered the dosages on prescription charts totaling to 21 patients who suffered as a result of his actions.

As Peter Wright QC outlined the prosecution case against him, Chua has pleaded not guilty to 36 charges in all, including the three alleged murders as the other charges are made up of, one count of grievous bodily harm with intent, 23 counts of attempted grievous bodily harm, eight counts of attempting to cause a poison to be administered and one count of administering a poison.

All offences mentioned are said to have happened between June 2011 and January 2012. The pattern that emerged after a massive police investigation had pinpointed and identified the killer of 10 men and two women:

• The pieces of the forensic jigsaw began to emerge.
• The person responsible for each of these matters became increasingly clear. It was, we say, Victorino Chua.
• As the investigation intensified, the common denominator, the defendant, was shown in sharper and sharper relief.
• Motive for this course of conduct, whomsoever is responsible, is difficult to determine with precision.
• Only the person responsible could ever know why they would embark on such conduct.

Mr Wright said it was the prosecution’s job to prove Chua was responsible, not to say exactly why, or ‘what caused him to turn from a man who had dedicated his life to caring for others, to harming them’.

Chua had worked on two wards, A1 and A3, at the hospital, but it was a “lottery” as to which patients were harmed, because the saline bags and ampoules he contaminated with insulin were then used by other unsuspecting doctors and nurses on innocent patients, Wright said.

The prosecutor continued: ‘In the vast majority of cases, the poisoner seems to have contaminated products or altered prescription dosages completely at random.

The father-of-two, a Filipino nurse, who lived in Stockport, denies the offences but has yet to formally enter pleas.

Original News published in The Guardian