A DOCTOR and two nurses were charged with murder yesterday after being accused of killing hospital patients after the Hurricane Katrina disaster last year.

The three are alleged by authorities in New Orleans to have given four elderly patients a “lethal cocktail” of morphine and another drug as conditions in the city’s Memorial Medical Centre rapidly deteriorated in the days after the hurricane struck.

“We’re talking about people that pretended they were God and they made that decision,” Charles Foti, the AttorneyGeneral for Louisiana, said yesterday. “This is a homicide. This is not euthanasia.”

The three charged with second-degree murder are Anna Pou, 50, an ear, nose and throat specialist, and two nurses, Lori Budo, 43, and Cheri Landry, 49. They were arrested at their homes yesterday, handcuffed and charged. They were later released on $100,000 (£54,750) bail.

Mr Foti has been investigating for nearly a year whether medical staff put to death some “acute care” patients at the 317-bed hospital, where 45 patients were found dead after Katrina devastated the city.

The hospital had been cut off by flooding after the August 29 hurricane caused the city’s levees to breach. Power was cut off and the temperature inside the wards rose to more that 37.8C (100F). Staff and patients had to wait four days before being moved to safety.

“If someone goes to a nursing home you want to think that they are safe,” Mr Foti said. He said that other staff were told by the accused that “we’ll take care of it”, adding: “That ‘taking care of it’ meant homicide was committed. The crime was that they took morphine and midazolam [a sedative] and injected it into the patients without their permission.”

Mr Foti said that one patient had gasped “that burns” as the drugs were injected. He emphatically denied that the four patients were already dying.

According to the arrest warrant, the patients were injected on September 1, 2005, three days after Katrina struck.

Mr Foti said that after bodies at the hospital had been recovered, tissue samples from the deceased were sent to laboratories, where traces of the drugs morphine and midazolam were found.

Forensic pathologists looked at the patients’ medical records and saw that none had been receiving either drug before Katrina struck.

“Taken together, they become a lethal cocktail that guarantees they are going to die,” Mr Foti said. He said that the three accused had made sure that the water in the patients’ intravenous drip was sterile so that “every bit” of the drug cocktail spread throughout their bodies.

Mr Foti said that there was a prohibition against assisted suicide in Louisiana. “We feel they abused their privileges as medical professionals.”

Dr Pou’s lawyer, Rick Simmons, said of his client: “She is innocent of the charges and we intend to vigorously contest them.”

Shortly after he began his investigation late last autumn, Mr Foti issued 73 subpoenas to staff and doctors at the Memorial Hospital. In January, one doctor at the hospital, Bryant King, told CNN that other doctors at the facility had talked about putting patients “out of their misery”.

In a December interview, Dr Pou told a Baton Rouge television station: “There were some patients there who were critically ill who, regardless of the storm, had the orders of do not resuscitate. In other words, if they died, to allow them to die naturally, and to not use heroic methods to resuscitate them.

“We all did everything in our power to give the best treatment that we could to the patients in the hospital to make them comfortable,” she said.

In the days after Katrina hit and New Orleans was devastated by flood waters, hospitals had no power and quickly ran out of food and medicine, all in sweltering heat. There have been rumours of “mercy killings” as the city descended into chaos, but these are the first criminal charges to be filed.

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