Nurse poisoned 20 patients with disinfectant

Ayumi Kuboki, 31, was arrested on suspicion of involvement in the death of Sozo Nishikawa,an 88-year-old patient under her care, after police discovered a large amount of disinfectant in the man's body. According to police, Kuboki admitted not only poisoning himNishikawa and many other patients over a period of about two months in the fall of 2016.

"I also used disinfectant on other patients,"Asahi Shimbunquoted Japanese nurse said."I did that with 20 patients."

During interrogation, Kuboki said he only targeted seriously ill patients who were likely to die during his shift.KubikiFinding it "troublesome" to explain the reason for death to the patient's relatives, they arranged to inject disinfectant into the IV bags so that they would die during someone else's shift.

"It would be troublesome for me to bear the responsibility of explaining the reason for the patient's death to their family," Kuboki told police.

In the case of Mr. Nishikawa, police believe that some kind of poison was injected into his body between 3:00 PM and 4:55 PM on September 18, 2016, when Kuboki was preparing to end his shift and go home. His health condition deteriorated rapidly and at around 7:00 PM, the patient passed away. At this time, the nurse on duty afterKubokiThe shift is not over yet and the patient's relatives must be notified.

Two days after Nishikawa's death, his roommate, 88-year-old Nobuo Yamaki, also passed away.Mr. Yamaki's body was taken for an autopsy after nurses noticed several bubbles inside his IV bag. When he was discovered,Yamakipoisoned, the police turned to investigate Mr. Nishikawa's death.

The investigation was initially hampered by the lack of surveillance cameras in the patients’ rooms. But police later found small holes in 10 IV bags in the nurses’ room, leading them to believe someone had used a syringe to inject disinfectant into the bags.

Police found traces of the chemical on Kuboki's clothes while inspecting the nurses' uniforms. They questioned Kuboki last month after she quit her job at Oguchi Hospital, and made an arrest on July 7.

Kuboki qualified as a nurse in 2008 and worked at another hospital before being recruited to Oguchi Hospital in May 2015. Police say they will never know the true number of victims suspected of being poisoned by Kuboki, as most of them were cremated.

“We had no idea she was such a problematic person,” a hospital worker told the Asahi Shimbun. Meanwhile, a colleague who worked with Kuboki at a previous hospital described the nurse as “capable but the type of person whose thoughts are hard to predict.”