World News for Students of English

18-03-2016 07:00

This is the dentist French media are calling “the butcher” arriving at a court in central France earlier this week.

Fifty-one-year-old Jacobus Marinus van Nierop is accused of mutilating over a hundred patients, before fleeing to Canada where he was arrested in 2014. Many of the dentist’s former patients were present for the beginning of the trial and shared horror stories about their alleged experiences.

One woman told a French newspaper that she went to van Nierop to have braces fitted, but left having had eight of her teeth painfully pulled from her mouth. She says she bled for three days. Another claimed she had her teeth filed down, when she was expecting to have them cleaned.

A lawyer for van Nierop was quoted in January as saying the dentist recognized that he did not do good work, but said he was not the horrible person some people had described. She said his flight to Canada was part of a plan to take his own life, adding, that he was in poor health.

If found guilty of mutilation and charges of defrauding French social security, van Nierop could face 10 years in prison and a fine of 375,000 euro.

Difficult words: accuse (to say that somebody is guilty of a crime), mutilate (to damage, to hurt), flee (to run away), former (-ex), trial (when somebody is in court), alleged (something people say, but we don’t know it for sure), braces (wires in the mouth which straighten the teeth), claim (to say), file down (to reduce the size with a file – a tool), flight (an escape), guilty (responsible for a crime), defraud (to cheat), fine (the money you must pay for doing something bad).

Source: www.ondemandnews.com