Four doctors and two nurses sent to trial over suspected ICU deaths in Bucharest

Charges and referral

Prosecutors attached to the Bucharest Tribunal have sent six defendants to trial: four doctors specialising in anaesthesiology and intensive care, and two female nurses from the intensive care unit (ATI) at the Sf. Pantelimon Emergency Clinical Hospital in Bucharest. The referral order is dated 30 October 2026, and the prosecutors made it public in a press release on Tuesday, 10 November 2026. The charges are qualified murder, attempted qualified murder, attempting to induce the commission of an offence, false testimony, intellectual forgery and inciting intellectual forgery. The doctors have denied all the accusations. The case now goes before a court, where the defendants will answer the charges.

How prosecutors describe the method

According to the referral, between May 2023 and April 2024 several patients in the unit had their life-sustaining treatment cut on purpose and with no medical reason, in order to bring about their deaths. The prosecutors allege the doctors picked patients they judged to have no chance of survival, without any objective clinical assessment or formal prognosis procedure. Once a patient was chosen, the defendants used one or more methods, alternately or together. The first, as set out in the prosecutors' press release, was an abrupt reduction of the noradrenaline dose given through a syringe pump, from high therapeutic levels to a minimum, usually 1 ml/h. Libertatea adds that a second method involved lowering the oxygen fraction (FiO2) on ventilators to 21%, the level of ordinary air, which it says caused severe hypoxia in intubated patients. The charges also cover entries in medical records that did not reflect what was done to the patients.

The prosecutors summarised the core allegation in their statement:

“The treatment supporting vital functions was deliberately and without medical justification reduced, with the aim of hastening death.”

Patients and outcomes

Libertatea reports that the evidence ties four patient deaths to the reduced treatment, that one case remained at the attempt stage, and that in a sixth case staff did not carry out the reduction orders. The conduct in the referral is dated to the period from May 2023 to April 2024, while the referral order itself was signed in October 2026. Libertatea also says the method may have been applied over several years, not only within that twelve-month window.

The chart above sets those dates against the referral and announcement dates. The outcome figures for the cases named in the referral are shown below.

Patients who died4

Attempted cases1

Cases where orders were not applied1

Patients who died

4 cases

Attempted cases

1 cases

Cases where orders were not applied

1 cases

Data from the article text

Background to the case

Adevarul reports that the scandal broke in 2024, when a male nurse raised the alarm that 20 patients might have died because a medicine was administered improperly. The outlet refers to the affair as the "Noradrenalina" case. The referral is the next stage of that case, and the accusations are still untested in court. The defendants are presumed to be neither guilty nor cleared until the court rules.