Mark van Nierop, the Dutch dentist accused of having mutilated his 2,800 patients in Château-Chinon, will have to answer for his acts before the French justice. The Netherlands extradited the prisoner on Thursday.
The “dentist butcher” is back in France. Mark van Nierop was extradited on Thursday from the Netherlands, his country of origin, where he has been imprisoned for several months. Accused of having mutilated his some 2,800 patients, he must be presented in the evening to an examining magistrate in Bourges.
“Horse anesthesia”, dislocated jaws
This 50-year-old Dutchman practiced in Château-Chinon, in the Nièvre, between 2008 and 2013, before being indicted by the French justice for “willful violence resulting in permanent mutilation”, “swindle” and “forgery and use false “. The charges are particularly sordid.
Mark van Nierop practiced “horse anesthesia”, according to accounts. Once the patient was stunned, he allegedly operated on them, ignoring basic rules of hygiene and asepsis. In their gums, some have found bits of strawberry and roulette, or pieces of bandage. The dentist would have dislocated jaws, sewn gums with the cheek, healthy teeth pulled out for no medical reason – all, of course, overcharged.
The victims of the “horror dentist”, as the media call him, suffered from various disorders, ranging “from the onset of sepsis to infarction through all kinds of dental problems”, specifies the dental collective de la Nièvre, which brings together hundreds of plaintiffs. To limit the appearance of abscesses and infections, the practitioner would have prescribed antibiotics at very high doses.
A messiah in a medical wilderness
However, when he arrived in the region in 2008, he was greeted as a savior. In Château-Chinon, in the middle of the medical desert, we had not seen a dentist for two years. To meet the needs of the population, the general council of Nièvre had appointed a particularly ill-informed Dutch headhunter. Indeed, Mark van Nierop had already been prosecuted in 2003 in his country for similar facts. Since then, he had been forgotten.
After his indictment, the dentist fled to Canada in December 2013. He would have met a woman on the Internet and wanted to settle with her, according to the local press. Under an international arrest warrant, he was repatriated to the Netherlands.
Mark van Nierop has always refused his extradition to France. He accused himself of the murder of his first wife, which he allegedly committed in 2006. The investigation is still ongoing. The man says he suffers from “psychological problems” including “problems of sexual identity and suicidal tendencies” requiring special treatment available, according to him, only in the Netherlands. An unconvincing argument for the judges, who validated his transfer.
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