A judge with the war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia has been identified by Dutch prosecutors as one of the alleged victims of a nurse charged with murdering 13 people over a four-year period.

Judge Li was one of her victims

Evert Beorstra

Chinese judge Haopei Li died in November 1997 at the age of 91. No details on the cause of his death were released at the time.

The nurse, Lucy Isabella Quirina de Berk, is accused of killing both children and elderly people in her care by giving them a lethal dose of morphine and potassium.

The killings are alleged to have taken place between February 1997 and September 2001.

Ms De Berk, 40, has been in custody for six months and is due to go on trial in The Hague in September.

Obsession

"The judge was one of her victims," Evert Boerstra, spokesman for the Hague prosecutors office told BBC News Online.

Mr Boerstra said was no indication that Li's position at the UN court had anything to do with his alleged murder.

A founding member of the 11-member war crimes tribunal in The Hague, the judge was due to retire the same month as his death.

Ms De Berk got into medical training using a fake high school diploma, her indictment says.

Prosecutors described her as a classic psychopath "obsessed with death".

Ms De Berk spent her teenage years in Canada after moving to Winnipeg from the Netherlands with her alcoholic parents, and later worked as a prostitute in Vancouver, prosecutors say.