London.- British nurse Lucy Letby, 33, has been found guilty of the murder of seven babies and the attempted murder of six others in a hospital in Chester (northwest England) between 2015 and 2016, the Manchester Crown Court reported this Friday.
During the trial, the evidence presented by the Prosecutor’s Office indicated that Letby killed the children, five boys and two girls, injecting them with air with a syringe intravenously while working at the Countess of Chester health center.
The woman, who was already suspected of the crimes since 2018, when she was first arrested, was arrested again in 2020 and charged by the police after receiving authorization from the Crown Prosecutor’s Office, who filed 22 charges against her.
The case shocked the United Kingdom, especially since suspicions of the deaths of newborns began to be directed in 2018 on the nurse, who has become the most prolific murderer of children in the history of this country.
The aforementioned court also found her guilty of the attempted murder of six other babies with methods that included, in addition to air injection, insulin poisoning or the administration of excessive amounts of food. The sentence will be announced on August 21.
Instead, the jury, which deliberated for more than 110 hours, found Letby, who was not in court today, not guilty of two attempted murders, while failing to reach a verdict on six other attempted murders.
The charges for which she has been sentenced correspond to the period between June 2015 and June 2016, when there were several deaths from unexplained causes of newborns at the Countess of Chester hospital.
The case shocked the United Kingdom from the moment suspicions about the deaths of newborns began to fall on the nurse in 2018.
Letby worked as a trainee student at the public center for three years, before finishing her studies at the local university and specializing as a children’s nurse.
Since then, the convicted woman has worked in the neonatal unit, specializing in babies that require different levels of care.
Each year, this unit cares for about 400 babies, but since the end of July 2016 it stopped admitting children born before 32 weeks of gestation, since which time no more deaths have been recorded.
A report published in 2017 by the Royal Medical College of Paediatrics and Child Health concluded that there was “no cause” to explain the increase in deaths in the unit registered as of 2014.
In that year, three newborns died, while in 2015 eight did and in 2016 six.
