An Australian right-to-die activist behind a new “suicide pod” says he rejects “absurd” allegations that the American woman who was allegedly its first user may have been strangled.
Philip Nitschke of the advocacy group Exit International said Wednesday that he was not physically present at the woman’s Sept. 23 death linked to the Sarco capsule in a forest in northern Switzerland, but he saw her live on television. video streaming.
The device worked as intended, he said, the first and only time it was used.
The head of a Swiss subsidiary of Exit International known as The Last Resort, Florian Willet, was present at the woman’s death and was immediately taken into police custody, where he remains while police investigate the circumstances surrounding the woman’s death. .
Several other people, including a journalist from the Volkskrant newspaper in the Netherlands, where Nitschke lives, were initially detained and prosecutors opened an investigation on suspicion of incitement and complicity in suicide.
They were later released.
Australian-born Nitschke broke weeks of silence with an interview with the respected Swiss newspaper Neue Zuercher Zeitung, published Wednesday.
Speaking by telephone to The Associated Press, he said he felt compelled to speak out because Exit International was “desperate” over the plight of Willet, who could remain behind bars for weeks or months pending a possible trial.
Philip Nitschke of the advocacy group Exit International said he was not present at the woman’s death on September 23 linked to the ‘Sarco’ capsule in a forest in northern Switzerland, but saw it live via video feed. .
Nitschke lies in a “suicide capsule” known as “El Sarco” in Rotterdam, Netherlands.
He said prosecutors requested an extension of Willet’s detention, “claiming there was no evidence of homicide.”
He denied the accusation.
“We have to try to do something about the fact that Florian has been trapped in prison for 58 days now,” Nitschke said.
He said he offered to travel to Switzerland to speak to prosecutors as part of their investigation and share video footage and data of the oxygen level in the capsule at the time the woman died.
“We will give everything we have,” he said, adding that prosecutors “have not accepted that suggestion.”
Swiss law allows assisted suicide as long as the person takes their own life without “external assistance” and those who help them die do not do so for “any selfish reason,” according to a government website.
Switzerland is one of the only countries in the world where foreigners can travel to legally end their lives and has several organizations dedicated to helping people commit suicide.
The first use of the Sarco capsule took place in the middle of the forest
Nitschke has repeatedly said that Exit International’s Swiss lawyers had warned that use of the capsule would be legal in Switzerland.
The ‘Sarco’, which Nitschke said cost $1 million to develop and build, was designed to allow a person sitting in its reclining seat to press a button that injects nitrogen gas into the sealed chamber.
Then the person becomes unconscious and dies of asphyxiation in a few minutes.
The 64-year-old woman was not identified. Nitschke, a trained doctor, said she had “compromised immune function” that made her “subject to chronic infection.”
On October 26, Volkskrant reported that the Swiss prosecutor had indicated in court that the woman could have been strangled.
Last month’s Volkskrant article said that one of its photographers, two lawyers and Willet were originally detained on suspicion of abetting and providing assistance to commit suicide.
“It’s absurd, because we have movies, that the capsule hasn’t been opened,” Nitschke said. ‘Everything happened exactly as we had planned. The woman climbed into the Sarco alone, closed the lid without help and pressed the button that released the nitrogen herself. He lost consciousness and died after about six minutes.
He added that Willet was holding a mobile phone through which Nitschke watched a live video of the woman using the Sarco, and immediately afterwards reported to police that she had died.
Nitschke recalled speaking to Willet on the phone at the time and telling him, “I was listening and answering his questions and calming him down because it was a very tense time for him.”
Peter Sticher, the prosecutor for the northern Schaffhausen region leading the legal case, declined to comment in an email to the AP on Wednesday, citing an ongoing investigation.
Nitschke, in front, next to a “suicide capsule” known as “El Sarco” in Rotterdam
Swiss police confiscated the only working Sarco device, but Nitschke said another one was in production. He said he wanted a “clear decision” from the Swiss courts before using the device in Switzerland again.
Exit presented the ‘Sarco’ to journalists during the summer. Before using it, the group had to overcome technical difficulties, including the abandonment of the project’s original designer, Nitschke said.
The Sarco has been heralded as a novel and peaceful way for people to take their own lives with the push of a button, as in a bucolic landscape of their choosing.
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