The founder of an alternative cancer clinic where three patients died during treatment has been given a two-year suspended jail sentence for causing their deaths.

Klaus Ross treated mainly Dutch patients who had not responded to conventional treatment at his clinic in Bracht, just across the border near Venlo.

Prosecutors asked for Ross to be jailed for three years after two Dutch and one Belgian patient died while being treated with 3-Bromopryuvate (3BP), an experimental drug which is being developed at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore but has not been approved for clinical use.

Ross was accused of giving dangerously high doses to five patients, two of whom survived but were left ‘severely ill’. The three who died were a 55-year-old man from Apeldoorn, a 43-year-old woman from Wijk en Aalburg and a 55-year-old Belgian woman.

The court in Krefeld was told that many of Ross’s patients were terminally ill by the time they came to him. He is not suspected of killing them deliberately.

Alternative clinicians in Germany are allowed to take blood samples and administer drugs by infusion, in contrast to the Netherlands, where they can only carry out these procedures under the supervision of a doctor.