Nurse murders spark French review

Unions say violence against staff is commonplace

The French health minister has promised to step up hospital security after two nurses were brutally murdered at work.

Philippe Douste-Blazy held emergency talks a day after the nurses' bodies were found at a psychiatric unit in Pau in south-western France.

The decapitated head of one of them had been left on top of a television set. The other had her throat cut.

Union leaders at the hospital have complained that recent staff reductions left them more vulnerable to attack.

The crime will add to the public pressure ministers already face as they try to rein in the spiralling costs of the French health system, says the BBC's Allan Little in Paris.

Even though it is ranked the best in the world by the World Health Organisation, France's health system is so expensive that it accounts for much of the country's large budget deficit, our correspondent says.

'Horrific'

Chantal Klimaszewski, 48, and Lucette Gariod, 40, were discovered in a blood-spattered room on Saturday morning in the geriatric ward of the psychiatric hospital in Pau.

"This is unspeakable, scandalous and horrible," Mr Douste-Blazy said on Saturday after visiting the scene.

"It was certainly someone very sick who did this," he said.

Five men have been questioned by police - four of them described as local vagrants and the fifth a patient who had recently been discharged. All five have been released.

No murder weapon has been found.

The fact that the person who committed such an atrocity is still out there... that obviously increases the feeling of anxiety Thierry Della Head of the emergency unit

There is no evidence that the nurses were attacked by any of their own patients.

They worked in the geriatric unit and all their patients have been accounted for.

Staff at the hospital and around France have been shocked by the murder.

"The fact that the person who committed such an atrocity is still out there and we have no idea what he wanted to achieve when he did it - that obviously increases the feeling of anxiety especially among the night staff," said Thierry Della, head of the hospital's emergency unit.

Mr Douste-Blazy met health workers and officials from the ministry of the interior on Sunday to review hospital security, after union leaders had said security had been a problem for months and that violence against staff was commonplace.

He said psychiatric units and emergency departments would be asked to establish hotlines to the police.