German woman's assisted suicide fuels debate

But this was no ordinary suicide. A German doctor told her just the right formula of antimalarial drugs and tranquilizers she needed to commit suicide painlessly--and he set up a camera to film her death.

The case has set off a firestorm here not only because of the way Dr. Roger Kusch has publicized his role in the death--holding a press conference in which he played snippets of the woman's last moments--but also because of the motives behind her suicide.

The 79-year-old Schardt was not in chronic pain or suffering from a terminal illness. She was healthy and simply wanted to avoid moving into a nursing home.

On Friday, five of Germany's 16 states plan to push the federal government to tighten laws on assisted suicide. They want to make it illegal for companies to profit from teaching people how to kill themselves.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who leads the conservative Christian Democratic Union, told a German television broadcaster on Wednesday that she opposes assisted suicide "in whatever form it comes."

But liberal politicians have cautioned against amending suicide laws too quickly.

"No snap decisions," Peter Struck, parliamentary leader for the Social Democrats, said this week. "No immediate laws that then come to nothing."

Suicide is not illegal in Germany, nor is assisting one. But mercy killing and euthanasia carry a heavy stigma here because of Nazi eugenics programs that killed more than 70,000 mentally ill and handicapped people before and during World War II.

Kusch, a Hamburg physician and former state justice senator told Schardt how to take enough of the antimalarial drug chloroquine and the tranquilizer diazepam to make her drift into unconsciousness and then arrest her breathing. He did not administer the deadly mixture and broke no law.