France Shocked By Double Murder and Beheading at Psychiatric Hospital

A savage double murder in the psychiatric wing of a French hospital, in which a nurse's decapitated head was left on top of a television in the patients' day room, stunned France and left hospital staff terrified of returning to work.

Staff at the 460-bed Pyrenees Hospital Centre near the south-western town of Pau discovered the bodies of two nurses - both in their 40s, and mothers of young children - at 6.45am on Saturday, police said.

One had been stabbed and slashed several times in the body, neck and throat, and was lying in a corridor in a pool of blood. The beheaded body of the second was lying at the foot of a fire door.

"It is horror, terror, fear, disgust - fear of returning to work," Cathy Sanders, a regional official from Worker's Front union, told RTL radio.

French police released four drifters and a former psychiatric patient yesterday after questioning them about the killings.

The French health minister, Philippe Douste-Blazy, convened an emergency meeting on hospital security in Paris yesterday after visiting the scene on Saturday. "This is unspeakable, scandalous and horrible," the minister told French media. "It was certainly someone very, very sick who did this. I have told the families that it will never be forgotten."

The hospital's medical director, Serge Foursan, told French television that the "fear is very real. There is no regular security patrol here and the staff are seriously afraid for thir own safety." Health union delegates were critical of the lack of proper security arrangements at the hospital, which they said was due to funding cuts.

The 21 elderly and infirm patients of the hospital's Montbretias wing, where the two victims had been on night duty on Friday, were being transferred to other accommodation.

A police spokesman said it was not yet known how the killer or killers had entered the building, which lies in the middle of a wooded 42-hectare park. However, investigators are "fairly sure" that a shattered window pane in the men's toilets was used as the escape route. Traces of blood left on the broken glass were being tested for DNA.

The murder weapon, thought by police to be a heavy sword or machete, had still not been found last night.

The two women were identified as nurse Chantal Klimaszewski, 48, and auxiliary Lucette Gariod, 40.